The feature will be announced in the coming weeks

Jul 9, 2009 08:30 GMT  ·  By

Google is all about an open Internet, even with the threat of several anti-trust investigations looming, and it is a strong backer of open web technologies. It has been supporting the OpenID login standard for a while, for example in its blogging platform Blogger, but now it plans to go even further and make every Google Apps domain name, more than one million, an OpenID provider.

What this means is that millions of users would be able to log in to the large number of sites supporting OpenID, still not large enough though, with their credentials from work or school. The feature isn't officially launched yet but it was made public by mistake by Eric Sachs, Google security product manager, on an OpenID mailing list and picked up by the Read Write Web blog.

“The service is important not only to the individuals in those organizations, who can interact with a variety of consumer websites with a single credential, but also to the organizations themselves, who are increasingly reliant on multiple Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions from different vendors,” the upcoming announcement would read.

The move could be a massive boost for OpenID which, while it continues to make progress, is still far from its goal. A large number of people would then be able to use sites and services with the login credentials they know and trust issued by their school or workplace. But, in order to make this possible, Google would redirect the OpenID relying parties, the sites or services users would log in to, to the company's own central OpenID service.

This presents two issues. As the current standard does not support this type of functionality, Google will offer its own implementation of the “Relying Party” pieces, and it also partnered with relying party technology provider JanRain's RPX as an interim solution. So the first problem is the technological one.

“There is the potential for some community members (or press) to assume (or at least imply in articles) some evil intent by Google to co-opt OpenID with these extensions,” Eric Sachs also wrote. But the second issue is a stickier one and has gotten the search giant worried too, since the move could be seen as the company, once again, taking control of a market or technology and the last thing it needs is more attention from government anti-trust agencies.