Draft OpenID v.Next Discovery working group charter

SitG Admin sysadmin at shadowsinthegarden.com
Fri Apr 16 15:17:32 UTC 2010


>Is it really unreasonable for most Internet users to own their own
>domain(s)? Why exactly?

How many of them will care about protecting it? How do you prevent 
them from selling it, or access to it, or control of it?

Also keep in mind that you're talking about ~6 billion unique names, 
which may go down to several hundred million if they're fine with 
taking different TLD's for the same names; but there'd still be a 
MASSIVE saturation of the namespace. Imagine trying to keep track of 
all your different friends' websites, with TLD information, maybe 
subdomain variations; confusing, or dangerously anti-privacy if it's 
made easier with a global registry allowing lookups by metadata.

>mention the larger privilege of potentially seeing much more of what
>their users do in their online activities. There is a rich spectrum of
>possibilities here for behaving well, and also it must be said, for
>behaving less well; for investing a little, or investing a lot. And
>that's what could turn it into a real marketplace...

Extortion, Inc.: "You haven't been 'behaving well' on the internet, 
you naughty girl. Pay up or we'll change your reputation."

>towards independence.  For example, if someone like Yahoo were to
>eventually screw up something as widely loved as Flickr, or Twitter
>found themselves overstepping the mark re targetted advertising
>(apologies to those companies - purely examples, I just happen to use
>and hence depend on those sites). People tend to complain more loudly
>than they praise, so I fear it'll take a high profile screwup or two
>before the value of this kind of freedom is really appreciated.

More than that. Facebook keeps drawing complaints, but it *also* 
keeps drawing new customers - perhaps the rate of adoption is faster 
than the rate of loss? All publicity is good publicity, and all that? 
A deliberate stunt (such as an April Fool's Day "your data has all 
been lost") *combined with* "If you had data portability, none of 
this would have happened." would raise awareness (but would be too 
risky from a PR standpoint, for all those users annoyed at a single 
day of unannounced offlineness and the emotional distress of thinking 
that everything was gone).

>ongoing of quality of service (b) link-based lock-in: moving my stuff
>would break every link to it in the Web. I can't see a plausible way
>around this without getting more users engaged with switching at the
>DNS level.

I do.

-Shade


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