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...