Great! Now the federal government is involved too :D I'm not sure this is a service I want the feds to provide.
All I mean is that your application (e-mail req for a ship) is processed by a human, and there's incentive to keep it that way (because there are objectively not enough 32-bit numbers for everyone to get their own.)
If you don't have one, you can still get on the network, you just have a 128-bit identity. It would be relatively easy to blacklist all of them if it becomes a case of abuse. At the scale of Reddit, you would probably need the help and intervention of the government (or at least some multiple of current staff devoted solely to new user onboarding) to prevent an impossibly large backlog from forming.
Maybe I'm overestimating the number of unique individual new users that sign up to reddit every day.
Theoretically, a company in each country could do the same thing. You wouldn't want multiple competing companies in a country with overlapping databases, though, because it'd be way easier to just use your other-company identity to get a duplicate account. (It'd be like using your Facebook account to register once and then your Google account to register again.)
And because of that, any company that did this would have a sort of natural monopoly. So the respective government would have to at least regulate them a bit to avoid them exploiting their users. A "crown corporation", in the British terminology. (In British Columbia we have ICBC, a crown-corporation insurance company, as the issuer of physical ID, which works well enough.)
All I mean is that your application (e-mail req for a ship) is processed by a human, and there's incentive to keep it that way (because there are objectively not enough 32-bit numbers for everyone to get their own.)
If you don't have one, you can still get on the network, you just have a 128-bit identity. It would be relatively easy to blacklist all of them if it becomes a case of abuse. At the scale of Reddit, you would probably need the help and intervention of the government (or at least some multiple of current staff devoted solely to new user onboarding) to prevent an impossibly large backlog from forming.
Maybe I'm overestimating the number of unique individual new users that sign up to reddit every day.