Wes Felter points me to a paper being submitted for Sigcomm 2006: "Routing on Flat Labels". This paper presents a concept of using hierarchical Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) for the purpose of allowing flat namespaces to be "routable" on Internet scales. That is, "pure" names (with no location or other hiearchy information) could be practically routable across a network of networks on the scale of the Internet.
In 'digital identity' terms, imagine a community deploying such a system which allows routing of messages to 'digital identities' without centralized infrastructure (e.g., a large "directory in the sky")... Generating a new identity that can partcipate in communications across the Internet (or other networks) could be as easy as generating a long random number as an identity and publishing metadata about it to this distributed "ROFL"-based system. If that long random number were a public key, you could have self-authenticated, globally routable, totally decentralized identifiers. Not human friendly of course, as Zooko's triangle will say, of course...
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