The race is on to become the most valued and credible network identity guarantor on the net, and the stakes are high. If a company can serve as a trusted validator of user identity online, then they will be in a key position to negotiate and benefit from that user’s internet experience.

Witness Facebook Connect, which allows Facebook users to log into sites like the Huffington Post, Citysearch and USA Today without establishing new, separate accounts with each. The sites rely on Facebook to provide an identity management system for their users (who are also among Facebook’s 200 million users), and implicitly recognize the authenticity of Facebook’s profiles. The recent announcement of Pay with Facebook suggests how Facebook can further leverage its credibility as an identity broker to interpolate itself into a user’s web experience.

Yahoo has been flexing its muscles recently as well. The portal posted some pretty astounding traffic following the news of Michael Jackson’s heart attack (providing a useful reminder that although the company is often the butt of jokes in the tech world, when it comes to serving users it is no lightweight), and in its ongoing re-branding strategy the company has reportedly been emphasizing the site as “your home on the web”, although questions remain as to whether Yahoo’s users consider it as such.

Google is also interested in providing the services of identity brokers. With a Google account users can access numerous products, from Picasa and YouTube to Docs, GTalk and Google Checkout. Each of these accepts the same Google login, and of course GMail can be used as a credential for innumerable sites that require an email address for registration.

In each of these cases, we are faced with a proposed fix to an essential conundrum of the internet: that users cannot be trusted to be who they say they are. Each of these institutions seeks – by its size, reputation and database – to be able to declare authoritatively that they can certify that a web user is who they say they are. Whether there will be room for multiple brokers, or if one will win out over the others, remains to be seen. Whatever authority emerges, however, we can expect an increasingly prevalent network identity that remains the same across different platforms and services, and a general intolerance to serve those who insist on an anonymous internet.