Comparing PublicIdentity.org with domain names
Domain names are a key part of how the internet works.
Advantages
- They are easily recognized and used.
- They are public (by design).
- Most identities that are big enough have a website and thus a domain name.
- Generally speaking, you need to pay for a domain name, so there are some limits to spam.
- List of registered domain names are available.
Disadvantages
- Not everyone has their own website.
- Not everyone has a top-level domain: Mozilla maintains a public suffix list of top-level domains that allow unrelated identities under them. Some of these allow free registration and are prone to spam.
- There are a lot of unused domains.
- The
whois service shows who owns a domain, but is so heavily redacted that it is not useful.
Notes
As of 2024-04-24, there are about 379 million domain names (source).
I do not think domain names can be used for seeding identities.