On Sat, Dec 25, 2021 at 4:45 PM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
--On Saturday, December 25, 2021 12:21 -0800 Randy Presuhn
<randy_presuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi -
>
> On 2021-12-25 12:00 PM, John Levine wrote:
> ...
>> I get an endless stream of mail intended for people with
>> names similar to mine who imagine that my address is their
>> address. I don't see why the situation here would be any
>> different.
>
> Indeed, even in the case of someone fortunate to have a
> relatively uncommon family name, like me. It turns out there
> is even another Randy Presuhn, roughly the same age as me, my
> second cousin in Iowa. For my husband, with the exceedingly
> common family name of Nguyen, there appear to be countless
> collisions just within the context of our city, much less
> world-wide. The considerations keep pushing in the general
> direction of X.500, but we know how well that has worked out
> so far...
I've been trying to resist the temptation to make that analogy
:-(
Maybe worth remembering that, if one goes back several centuries
and in relatively small communities, the reason for inventing
what because surnames, often starting from patronymics,
matronymics, village or country names, occupations, or other
attributes, all appear to have originated from a need to solve
the same problem at a much less challenging scale.
And, since this discussion started with an example starting with
"@Alice", I note that a conversation that includes both John
Levine and myself requires extra qualification and energy (in
spite of my having a family name that is probably less common
than Randy's and the protection of a tradition that forbids
having two living people in the same family branch with the same
first name).
I don't have all the answers, but I think I can provide an improvement on the status quo.
One side effect of the use of patronyms was that they reinforce patriarchy in ways that has significant impact even today.
I have little difficulty making contact with my male professional and social contacts from 30 years ago but I have lost contact with many of my female contacts because they have changed their names after getting married. Sometimes more than once.
If people had a name that they could use for life, that would answer that problem (or remove that advantage).
If we are using human readable names, there is going to be some idiot who really wants to be @thanos and a Disney lawyer telling them they can't.
But even if that has to happen, the old binding of @thanos will still the visible for those who want to contact the original holder. So the considerations are not the same as for DNS names. There can be multiple bindings to the same name but only one can be the active binding at a given time.
There are no perfect solutions but there can be better than what we have today which is Alice has no power, only the domain name owner has power and domain names are very expensive to buy and to use. They are not designed for identifying people, they are designed for identifying organizations who own and operate computers.
