The asymmetry of internet identity
The story so far: In the beginning the IP address was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
IP addresses give us everything, and yet surprisingly little. Scribble one on a packet, send it out, and maybe it will get somewhere. Where is anybody’s guess. After a while some packets come back with the that IP address in the sender field. Maybe it’s from them, maybe it makes sense, maybe some got lost on the way.
Next come the true foundation of the modern internet: brands. A brand is a domain name that you recognize. These used to be organizations like Universities and Military Labs and other Very Serious relics of ages past, but these days it is Facebook and Google and Disney.
In theory you resolve brands using DNS, which maps names to IP addresses. But that part of the internet is almost trivial and it doesn’t really work. The heavy lifting is done by TLS certificates, who thanks to a cast of about 180 questionable characters, you can be assured that the packets coming from somewhere, which were resolved by someone to be something, actually belong to a particular Brand.
It could be as simplistic as a land rush for a particular email address and defining a password, or uploading a photo of a government ID and a selfie, bouncing a text through a somewhat-registered phone system, or performing a financial transaction. All that matters is it is done to the satisfaction of the Brand, and that is determined by whatever metrics are in the software the Brand’s fraud team has deployed.
