BeN LiVsHits
there is a lot of
fear that any real
enforcement of Do
Not track might
end up destroying
the fundamental
revenue model for
the Web economy.
i don’t think we
are likely to see
enforcement in any
form anytime soon.

eryone would just continue to be stuck with the same old mess as before.

GN-N: How would that actually work?

JG: CAs would be converted into notaries, and then the browser user would choose which notaries to trust. If any of those notaries were to become untrustworthy for any reason, the user could easily remove the trust indicated for that particular notary. That’s very important because in the current CA model it’s very difficult—if not impossible—to withdraw trust from any one CA without breaking the Web, which makes things very challenging.

One of the major criticisms [computer security researcher] Moxie Marlinspike (a pseudonym) has raised about the CA model has to do with this lack of trust agility. That is, whomever we decide to trust, we’re then obliged to trust forever. Still, Moxie and the team responsible for introducing the Convergence plugin say they have taken the idea about as far as they can, and the browser vendors now need to take it the rest of the way, but the browser vendors seem pretty disinterested.

GN-N: The biggest problem with the Convergence model is that it trusts the user to do the right thing, but most users will just do whatever they’re told.

JG: Maybe this is naive on my part,
but I think users have a pretty good
idea of whom they trust and whom
they would like to trust and whom they
know they’re not about to trust.