SAN FRANCISCO -- Network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. and more than 30 other companies on Wednesday unveiled plans for a personal identification system to smooth commerce on the Internet, while allowing users to decide who holds sensitive information about them.
The project, which calls itself the Liberty Alliance, represents a clear challenge to Passport, Microsoft's competing and controversial system, which is also the early leader in the field.
The consortium of companies said they invited Microsoft to link its Passport technology to the planned system, but a Microsoft executive said he knew of no talks and accused Sun of trying to trip up its competition.
Liberty includes Bank of America, General Motors, online auctioneer eBay and mobile handset maker Nokia Ab Oy, among others, and it has courted Internet service provider American Online, although AOL declined to comment.
The Liberty group aims to give consumers secure, private identities so that they can do business more readily on the Internet and with mobile phones.
Data would be accessible through a single sign-on for convenience but could be stored with various competing companies -- a key difference with Microsoft's Passport system, which has been criticized as giving too much sensitive data to a single company.
"Basically that is the beauty of the system. The consumer maintains control," Marge Breya, chief marketing officer of Sun's iPlanet E-Commerce group, said in a telephone interview.
The Liberty project could launch in six months but plans remain tentative, Breya said.
Microsoft, which said last week it would expand Passport to include other companies, could emerge as a chief ally or opponent of Liberty.
Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive and a vocal Microsoft critic, told a conference call Microsoft would be able to set some terms for their participation.
"It is really going to be up to AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft whether they want to interoperate," he said.
Adam Sohn, product manager for Microsoft's .NET platform strategy group, said he would be willing to talk about joining Passport, which has 165 million accounts, to Liberty, but had not done so.
"It's standard Sun practice to make these kind of announcements with not a lot of detail," Sohn said. "I think it's an attempt to sort of slow others down."
AOL, which is a joint venture partner with Sun in the iPlanet e-commerce project and is working on its own Net identity project, Magic Carpet, is considering its options, a spokesman said, declining to comment specifically on Liberty.
Doubts about Liberty's prospects sprang up immediately among analysts who said the technology would be tough to perfect and agreement hard to reach among partners.
Giga Group's Rob Enderle said Sun and AOL would have to join forces to counter Microsoft and the fact that they had not done so yet was problematic. The Liberty group would find it tough to agree on standards, delaying the product, he said.
Microsoft is often accused of announcing "vaporware" products before they are ready to head off competitors, but in this case it is the only major player on the field.
"Microsoft's product offering has a lot of flaws, but it will be there. Better-but-not-there is not really better," Enderle said.
"My ultimate take was that it was a press release to counter Passport," said Yankee analyst Neal Goldman.
Liberty technology would have to be absolutely bulletproof, given the huge stakes riding on an e-commerce platform, he said, although Liberty members said technology was the easiest step and that companies were committed.
"There is both manpower and money," Nokia's chief technology officer, Mikko Terho, told the call.
But the group is only starting to design the system, work out a way to brand it and address issues such as security.
Liberty would build the lowest common denominator between some current systems in order to link them, rather than build something from scratch.
"We've got to make sure that this is not an exercise to boil the ocean," said Internet media company RealNetworks Inc. Chief Executive Rob Glaser, urging the group to keep its goals reasonable.
Liberty Alliance Project members include ActivCard SA, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America Corp., Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems Inc., eBay, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet Corp., eBay, Entrust Inc., Fidelity Investments, Gemplus International, General Motors, Global Crossing, i2 Technologies Inc., Intuit Inc., Liberate Technologies Inc., Nokia, NTT DoCoMo Inc., Openwave Systems Inc., O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security Inc. , Sabre Holdings Corp., Schlumberger Ltd., Sony Cor., Sprint Corp., Travelocity.com Inc, United Airlines.
