GoDaddy just announced a “Trusted Identity Naming System for AI Agents.” At first, the original blog post from GoDaddy sounds good. The promise of an open system is catchy: “New agnostic framework allows anyone to easily find, verify and trust AI agents.” A way to give artificial intelligences unique names, “build confidence,” and let humans know which agents to trust. But it may quietly reintroduce the oldest form of digital control: deciding who gets to exist online. In practice, it reads like the oldest trick on the internet — turning trust into a service . A Familiar Pattern Every decade or so, someone rediscovers that there’s money in “managing trust.” In the 2000s it was Extended Validation certificates. Then came the blue-tick era of “verified” users. Now it’s the AI agent namespace — a new market for digital legitimacy. GoDaddy isn’t proposing a decentralized identity system; it’s proposing a central ledger of permission. No standards body, no RFC, no hint of open g...
Some personal considerations I just read Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter and found it quite insightful. Much of today’s lobbying, often driven by governments and large media companies, seems to push toward a strictly regulated internet, a model profoundly disrespectful of the values the net was originally built upon. These lobbying actions can be summed up in just one word: censorship, with privacy compression not far behind. Cloudflare’s approach, on the other hand, feels very different: a liberal, agnostic stance that doesn’t deny the need for content monetization. As they put it: “what fundamentally needed to change was not more content moderation at the infrastructure level but instead a healthier incentive system for content creation.” AI has dramatically changed the rules. Instead of driving users to websites where creators might at least earn some reward in terms of advertising revenue or personal recognition, AI agents now consume the content for us, leaving (at be...