One promising option for widespread TLSNotary usage and acceptance is if we have a number of companies running notary authorities”, defined as highly regulated and well-compensated firms that run an airtight notarization operation for consumer data:
- All notarization happens in Trusted execution environments
- If any evidence is created that a firm accepted bribes for fraudulent notarization, they are majorly slashed or lose their users
- They sign partnerships with specific websites using their services or identity wallet providers or get grants from aligned orgs like the EF, Protocol Labs, Apple (pro-privacy, doesn’t run a ad/data-centric business)
- etc. etc.
Inspiration for this idea comes from certificate authorities, which are essentially “domain notarization authorities” for the web. Current CAs have the best moat to evolve into general TLSNotary authorities, as they’re widely recognized and trusted across all computers.
TLSProxy companies like Reclaim and TLSNotary companies like Pluto and Opacity are some proto-version of this, but I think we should go further and establish these as proper entities on the Internet. Develop standards, having more openness on the setup, more legal contracts to prevent fraudulent notarization, etc.
I also think for maximum reach in the web2, these entities should have as little on-chain involvement as possible. My rough sense is that’s an anti-signal for self-respecting web2 companies. And I think they’ll be more excited about strong technical/legal/reputational guarantees vs crypto-economic guarantees.
In some sense, the Signed web pages (SXG) on the Internet Archive basically has the Internet Archive become a notary authority for all public info. TLSNotary of course lets us do this with private data.
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