Re: [saag] post-X509 cryptographic identities

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 07:48:18PM +0100, Henry Story wrote:
> I think one has to take it as a ”fait accompli” that domain name
> dilution has happened. In any case asking people to remember the
> meaning of 2 character codes for country names globally would have
> required a huge investment in teacher training, child training etc… to
> accomplish.  Most Europeans have trouble remembering where US states
> are located even though it is taught in final years around the age of
> 17-18. Most US citizens have trouble remembering all the states of
> Europe, even though many had ancestors the immigrated from here.

That's a misconception, that peole need to know country codes.  Or that
we need anything like geopolitical hierarchy in the DNS, except for the
purposes of registration and dispute resolution, which requires
namespaces with registries, registrars, and sovereign jurisdictions, but
not much more.

> That is not the way to do things. Instead lets accept that choosing
> domain names is taken over by marketing folks, that poor countries are

Yes.

> selling their domains to make much needed money, etc… Furthermore the
> only way to get rid of domain name squatters is to make their business
> irrelevant by just adding new domain names.
> 
> Instead one should lead the Sovereigns to enter into the web by providing
> data in machine readable format, about the companies and web sites that
> wish to tie themselves to those legal institutions, the benefits of
> which are not to be underestimated: you only need to live some time in
> lawless zones, from squats onwards to understand how helpful the law
> is.  This can be done in a purely opt in basis, though it would
> require some conventions to be agreed upon, and the basic naming
> infrastructure to work securely.

We have this now.

You might propose tweaking governance.  You might propose all sorts of
things, but some will be easier to pull off than others.

> Btw. one of the reasons why the system worked for so long, is that initially
> the web of trust on which domain names and URIs built was built up
> in a peer to peer manner by people linking pages. Those pages that got
> the most links rose to the top in search engines that started using that
> information (At AltaVista we did not know how to do it).

Yes, the search engines function as a sort of registry.

> Now that undermining the system of links through bots has a lot of 
> value, that architecture no longer works. One actually now needs the
> systems that have evolved to deal with law and law breakers, which
> are called states, and which exist in diplomatic/anarchic relations
> with one another.

Yes.  But would any alternative look that different to the current DNS?
I am very skeptical.

Nico
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