I see motor grouping/classes as separate to driver licensing. To give my perspectives on Europe vs USA on having a single body like the CIK…
You have to remember in Europe you can travel only a couple of hundred miles to need an international license. In the US… it’s thousands in most cases.
Really only about 400-500 racers out of 20,000 would need a national license. With maybe 50 of them needing an international one. So it doesn’t matter in the US. It’s not worth the effort of enforcement for so few drivers. There’s really no incentive.
Things have changed a lot. (@Alan_Dove can give better details than I can). Until the late 90’s in Europe, CIK sanctioned the majority (practically all) of “competition” Karting.
Then two things happened.
Anti-competition ruling in the EU court allowed FIA drivers to run in non FIA competition without risking their license.
Rotax Max came along and turned the karting demographic upside down.
When it came to product/market fit…the CIK’s response (KF) was tragically off base but was still forced on ASNs
One problem… most kart racers didn’t want it.
Racers, teams spoke with their wallets, the CIK became out of touch with karting beyond their “ladder” bubble. “Independent” karting became a thing and since then I’d wager a significant number of racers are no longer running under an ASN.
It’s not really insurance’s place to enforce that though.
I’m open to correction, but my understanding is that most Karting insurance in the US is underwritten by a Lloyd’s of London… Then brokered by a handful of groups. WKA, NKA, IRA and AKTPA/TAG (from memory).
In short, the effort required to enforce or even incentivize a system like that in the US is not worth it and insurance companies have their own standards
in place for safety based on their assessment of risk.
That said, SKUSA do have a licensing system in place.