[ryan29]

> since there's no authoritative, authenticated unique name system across indices

Domains provide a globally unique namespace and ownership can be verified automatically with domain validation. Bluesky did an ok job of it, but they didn't do anything to account for domain ownership changes and re-validation is non-existent, which is disappointing to see from the first big adopter since the oversight will eventually invite criticism.

I've wanted domain validated namespaces for 5+ years. Here's a comment I made about using domain validated namespaces in package managers a couple of years ago [1]:

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I think one possible solution to that would be to assume namespaces can have their ownership changed and build something that works with that assumption.

Think along the lines of having 'pypi.org/example.com' be a redirect to an immutable organization; 'pypi.org/abcd1234'. If a new domain owner wants to take over the namespace they won't have access to the existing account and re-validating to take ownership would force them to use a different immutable organization; 'pypi.org/ef567890'.

If you have a package locking system (like NPM), it would lock to the immutable organization and any updates that resolve to a new organization could throw a warning and require explicit approval. If you think of it like an organization lock:

    v1:

        pypi.org/example.com --> pypi.org/abcd1234

    v2:

        pypi.org/example.com --> pypi.org/ef123456

If you go from v1 to v2 you know there was an ownership change or, at the very least, an event that you need to investigate.

Losing control of a domain would be recoverable because existing artifacts wouldn't be impacted and you could use the immutable organization to publish the change since that's technically the source of truth for the artifacts. Put another way, the immutable organization has a pointer back the current domain validated namespace:

    v1:

        pypi.org/abcd1234 --> example.com

    v2:

        pypi.org/abcd1234 --> example.net

If you go from v1 to v2 you know the owner of the artifacts you want has moved from the domain example.com to example.net. The package manager could give a warning about this and let an artifact consumer approve it, but it's less risky than the change above because the owner of 'abcd1234' hasn't changed and you're already trusting them.

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1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32754029