I'd be skeptical of a safe-for-life Internet for one reason: safety. Experian, Target, OPM... we've seen countless times that very entities the average person does business with [un]voluntarily can't be trusted with a person's details or credentials. All it would take is for one corporation to mess up and someone else would own a person's one and only safe-for-life identity which, as you noted, means they'd own their victim online entirely. Even if there's an appeal process, since the safe-for-life ID would have to be worldwide, ostensibly it'd be even more difficult for victims than it is to get a new SSN. It's a nice thought, but I wouldn't be willing to trust anyone, especially an organization like Experian that I can't even opt out of, with the safety of what amounts to my professional and a fair amount of my personal online life.
That's an excellent point. I didn't address this aspect today, but I touched on it a little in a HN comment I posted a couple months back.
Ideally, the identity-side would be handled in a distributed way through a network of brick-and-mortar notary businesses. An account "for life" wouldn't be so iron-clad as to ruin someone's life. It would be onerous in the sense that one would have to pay a fee to the notary, and provide government ID to replace their account. At which point (after which the original, compromised user ID is marked as invalid).
The point you make re: security-issues with retailers is relevant, but it applies primarily to the businesses who notarize users, probably not the retailers.
As an example of the difference, the user could request the notary electronically confirm to the public that the user has a high school diploma, but not reveal any details re: from which school, or from which year. I haven't thought this through, but I could envision a "Mailboxes Etc" type business providing both notary, and PObox/reship services so that other retailers couldn't even find out a user's address.
