Still, the administration’s plan has divided privacy rights activists. Some applaud the approach; others are apprehensive. “It seems clear,” Lauren Weinstein, the editor of Privacy Journal, wrote “that such a scheme is a pre-emptive push toward what would eventually be a mandated Internet ‘driver’s license’ mentality.”

Image Credit... Jonathon Rosen

The plan has also been greeted with skepticism by some computer security experts, who worry that the “voluntary ecosystem” envisioned by Mr. Schmidt would still leave much of the Internet vulnerable. They argue that all Internet users should be forced to register and identify themselves, in the same way that drivers must be licensed to drive on public roads.

“The privacy standards the administration wants to adopt will make the system both unwieldy and less effective and not good for security,” said Stewart Baker, a former chief counsel of the National Security Agency who favors government-issued Internet driver’s licenses.

But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, said such criticism was unfair. He said the Obama administration had created a policy framework that will make it possible for private industry to improve privacy and security technologies.

Some members of the Internet’s technical community say that the Web-of-trust approach is too little, too late to solve the Internet’s security problems. The problem is no longer just about cyberspace stalkers, thieves and con artists, but about the trustworthiness of the very fabric of the network itself.

“We’re now seeing attacks on the Internet’s plumbing,” said Rodney Joffe, senior technologist at Neustar, an Internet infrastructure firm. “If you get control of the plumbing there are lots of things you can do because the plumbing was never designed for a world where there is a lack of trust.”

The essential plumbing components are the routers, which direct traffic on computer networks. Operators of these routers — mostly private companies — share instructions with each other on how to direct that traffic. They trust the information is accurate. But at least three times this year, a substantial fraction of the global network’s messages were mis-routed through China, potentially opening millions of users to spying or tampering. Chinese Internet engineers say the misroutings were mistakes; other engineers are not so sure.