Who owns your name?

This post from Doc Searls pointed me in the direction of another post by Tom Matrulo about the whys and wherefores of changing email addresses. It got me thinking, and I eventually worked out that on average I’ve changed my primary email address about every 12 months for the last eight or nine years. It also connected with a discussion I’d had about three years ago with the people at the Austrian Government Portal, who have forgotten more about authentication and signon issues than I will ever know.

Their point was that an email address is one of the easiest personal identifiers that can be used for access and authentication purposes - the vast majority of the time it’s something that points to a single individual, it’s easy to remember (unless you’re in the habit of using a snugglywuggly78@hotmail.com-style address), and it’s something that most people are familiar with. Contrast that with something which is genuinely unique - like a national insurance number - and ask yourself how many people can readily quote theirs.

About two years ago I needed to change my email address to something personal (i.e. not belonging to a company), and started looking to see what combinations of my names were available as domain names. It turned out that most had already been regisitered, which suprised me greatly given that I’m not exactly a Smith or a Jones. What suprised me even more was that most had been registered speculatively by firms that would then supply email services using that domain - for a price. Suprised, because if they’d got as far as my name, they must have registered a shed-load of domains on the pure off-chance that someone would want them later.

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