[cap-talk] crypto purism vs. Pet Names (was: Firefox breaks the principle of identifiability)

[Sandro Magi]

> SDSI/SPKI-style names?  That's getting better.
> I'll have to think about that one some more.
>
> I am not sure whether I'm convinced yet.
> (I'm not sure I'd want to have to type "KPIX's Coca Cola";
> for instance, I might not remember what TV station I saw.
> Also, this doesn't fit the "I saw an ad on a billboard" model too well.)
> But it seems like it is getting closer.

I don't see why a service like Google is impossible in this scenario. You
sign up for an internet account and your introductory page is your ISP's
start page; this is your portal to the internet. Your ISP has already gone
through the hassle of typing in Google's unique key (if this step is
indeed necessary) and establishing a YURL to Google. Why not then just
search for "Coca Cola"?

Using an index like Google, there is a chance that you won't find the
specific product you saw advertised, but it's not much worse a chance than
exists today. If these limitations are well-established, then advertisers
will pre-emptively register their new pages with popular indexes like
Google, rather than waiting for them to be randomly crawled.

> Maybe part of the issue is that the crypto-purist view strikes me as
> blind to the possibility that maybe there are some things that branding
> and trademark do reasonably well.

I think they do perform reasonably well if the namespace is sufficiently
small. Trademarks can probably fit in the "name via introduction model" as
"government as introducer", as trademarks must be filed within legal
jurisdictions. The problem is that trademarks aren't global the way domain
names are global; domain names currently cross legal boundaries which has
caused various disputes in the past.

Sandro