Re: [saag] post-X509 cryptographic identities

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 02:51:01PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
> Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Can we move past domainnames?  Maybe.  What is realistic?
> >
> > One possibility is to do everything via smartphone apps, with app store
> > operators acting as curators.  Naming would still be about (trade)marks
> > (including icons, at least for those who are not sight-impaired), but we
> > might get past domainnames.  Who wants such a world?
> 
> When I wonder about this kind of thing, I try to think about the
> practicalities: would the OS vendors want to run registries for hundreds
> of millions of names themselves, or would they prefer to outsource it?

That's the gist, isn't it.  Registries.  Authorities.  Ultimately a tie
to legal dispute resolution mechanisms.  Messy stuff.

DNS was a worldwide revolution in naming affairs by creating a scalable,
global registration and authority system to go with a scalable
resolution system.

(From a UI perspective, DNS is just an evolution: before we had names,
after we had names.)

DNS and the Internet created realities on the ground that sovereign
entities had to recognize.  That seems likely an accident of DNS
stepping into a vacuum.  Now that the vacuum has been filled, any
replacement may well require significantly more willpower to establish.

> Would the setup be something like certification authorities? How would
> the namespace relate to the market structure: would they be parallel
> like the DNS, or unrelated like WebPKI? Would we end up with something
> like the CA/B forum, except also responsible for the top-level of the
> namespace, and thus effectively performing the same function as ICANN?

Yes, any future revolution in naming will have to deal with registries,
and will have to deal with sovereign entities.

Nico
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