In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?
> rule of one person per subdomain
What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!
> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.
There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.
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To stick with your comparison: when letsencrypt and ISRG launched they had actual answers for how to deal with the hard challenges in their space:
A) how to get included in a trust roots (crossigning with IdenTrust at first and the knowledge and expertise of how to get included in the longer term)
B) Automated domain validation in a standardized way (ACME)
C) Long term commitments of sponsorships to ensure people could trust it would stick around
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I wish you the best of luck, but I think this might have needed to bake a bit longer before publicizing.
No it won’t. Spammers will just pay thousands of random people in poor countries to create their domain.
A domain squatter is in an easier position to automate that than an amateur to not forget to respond.
Might be good to know that even in the US this approach would only work for ~50% of people, since a lot of people don't have passports. In most countries this does not work at all, since they don't issue NFC enabled ID/passports.
Oh, cool! Russia is not on the list. Another service that excludes me just becasue I got lucky with the colour of my (NFC-enabled, biometric) passport.
On a less bitter note, I don’t think it’s that hard to build biometric passport validation. Face matching would be another thing, but for unregulated industries I don’t think you’ll need that, so why not grab some library from GitHub and be in control of the whole process? (You would still need to handle people without biometric passports somehow, of course.)