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Comment by bugbuddy | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that there can only be one owner of JohnSmith.com in the ICANN WHOIS database but there can be millions of John Smith on META platforms.

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Yes, I accept that. I'm personally lucky that all the people alive with my surname in the world are related at the great-grandparent level. There's less than a handful with my firstname.

I briefly looked into trademarking my personal name (legal to do in Australia) but its cost prohibitive (vs verifying for multiple online platforms).

I even thought briefly about legally changing my name to include a new middle-name that was my PGP short key id. But Australia does not permit the use of numeric symbols in names. (Though I guess you could shift the hex string by 10 so 0-F maps to A-P. That wouldn't break the rules.)

Interesting idea RE PGP key as middle name... just it would suck to then later on lose access to your private key!

He can change his middle name again. It's not like the government will require him to produce the private key to do so

Or generate a vanity key id?

Those are all interesting things you could do, but in what way would they help when we’re talking about the Meta platform? We’re considering the case where someone is actively choosing to use a name that’s not their own for some reason, and if that reason required impersonation they’d just make an account using your publicly available PGP middle name as well.

But if there’s a john@smith.net, there can also be a john@smith.com, john@smith.org, john@smith.app, john@smith.us, etc

But most people would not be typing john@smith.net or any of the variants you mentioned into their browser address. My point still stands that domain names have a completely different set of constraints.

millions of John Smith all paying $11.99/month

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