In order to get a birth certificate for your newly born baby, you have to go to a birth certificate registrar. Imagine that those registrars were private companies, operating internationally, and that they could issue birth certificates to any legal "person", as well as actual human beings. People could register the birth in any country, but they had to pay one of those company every year to keep the birth certificate valid.
Anyone whose parents couldn't afford to register their birth, or were confused by the dizzying array on registrar options, could end up without a birth certificate. Anyone who couldn't afford to keep up yearly payments to a birth certificate registrar could end up without a valid birth certificate. Anyone without a birth certificate would be a second-class citizen, forced to make their identity a subsidiary of a first-class citizen, whether another human or a legal "person".
Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. Now that it's all but compulsory to have an email address to access a wide range of essential services, including government services, banking, and internet access, this is pretty much the situation we're in. A domain name is the online equivalent of a birth certificate, and thanks to the privatisation of the domain name system by the US, most people either don't know how to get their own or can't afford to.
Imagine the NZ government passed laws creating a domain space like id.nz. In which domain names can only be registered to human beings, one each, using the name on our birth certificate. That only have to be paid for the first time they're registered. So a name change by deed poll would include the registration of a new id.nz domain, and the sunsetting of the old one after a reasonable transition period.
Now to be clear, I'm proposing this as a supplement to the existing domain system, not a replacement. If people want to pay to register other domains and communicate pseudonymously, that right must be absolutely protected.
But everyone could have their own online identity without constantly paying for it. A wide range of services could be created to supply people with email addresses, chat addresses (XMPP or Matrix), and personal homepages using their id.nz domain.
@strypey oh yeah, I forgot that it has to be a TLD. I don't think Tamil Nadu has one, but the next best would be a known government-controlled subdomain. Or maybe the state can lobby to make it a TLD given its purpose! 🕸️
@strypey Intereting idea. I like it. Levereages the registrar functionality that is already in place in most governments. The problem of uniqueness raises some concerns. These would would effectively become national id's and could be used as such. I have no problem with this really - more upsides than down in my opinion.Maybe this approach could provide perm ids in a number of other areas. Perm ids seem a good role for government
@strypey I guess the state can be authoritative for identity .... How do we feel about having the state host personal homepages, chat, communication et al though? I feel like that might not be where we want to go.
@xurizaemon
> How do we feel about having the state host personal homepages, chat, communication et al though
It wouldn't be hosting any of that just the domain name pointing to it. In fact it wouldn't necessarily be doing that either, it could oblige the operators of the .nz namespace to do it.
Either way, people would have a choice about whether to use it. We could still register our own domains, or continue to use a third-party domain to identify ourselves online, if we chose to.
Add comment