The Agent Identity Authority: A Multi-Stakeholder Governance Framework for the Agent Identity Registry System

1.1. Scope and Non-Goals

This document defines the constitution, structure, processes, and bootstrap plan of the Agent Identity Authority. It is informational and independent-stream; it defines no protocol, no data format, and no new IANA registry. Its normative-language requirements bind the Authority's charter and the parties that voluntarily contract with the Authority (accredited Registry Operators and Registrars), not implementers of the wire protocols.¶

The following are explicitly outside the Authority's mission and outside the scope of this document: regulation of agent behavior; content policy of any kind; licensing, evaluation, or certification of AI models; reputation scoring; remote disablement ("kill switches") of agents; and law-enforcement functions beyond responding to lawful process under a published policy. Behavior is the province of relying parties, independent reputation services, certification bodies, and public law -- separate layers, per the layered reference model of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-problem-statement].¶

1.2. Relationship to the Companion Specifications

The Authority implements the "Governance Authority" role referenced throughout the companion documents:¶

• [I-D.drake-agent-identity-problem-statement] supplies the problem statement, threat model, and layered terminology this document assumes.¶
• [I-D.drake-agent-identity-registry] defines the architecture the Authority governs, including the functional requirements on the governance authority (its Section on Governance Authority Deployment Guidance) that this document satisfies.¶
• [I-D.drake-email-hardware-attestation] defines the "aid" URN registration template, whose registrant role the Authority is intended to assume (Section 15).¶
• [I-D.drake-agent-identity-epp] defines the Registrar-to-Registry provisioning protocol whose escrow deposits are encrypted to the Authority's escrow key and whose dispute and de-accreditation transitions the Authority directs.¶

Where this document and a companion protocol specification appear to conflict on a protocol matter, the protocol specification controls. Where they appear to conflict on a policy or institutional matter, this document controls. The Authority MAY adopt policies that constrain accredited parties beyond the protocol minimums, but MUST NOT adopt policies that contradict protocol invariants (for example, the retire-only handle remedy, the permanence of canonical identifiers, or the prohibition on fingerprint reassignment).¶

1.3. Requirements Language

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here. In this document these key words express requirements on the Authority's charter, bylaws, and contracts, not on protocol implementations.¶

1.4. Terminology

The terms "Agent Identity Document", "canonical identifier", "handle", "hardware fingerprint", "trust tier", "Shared Namespace", "Registry Operator", "Registrar", and "Relying Party" are used as defined in [I-D.drake-agent-identity-registry]. In addition:¶

Authority

The Agent Identity Authority defined by this document.¶

Board

The Authority's Board of Directors (Section 5).¶

Stakeholder Group

A defined constituency of Members that elects designated Board seats (Section 5.2).¶

Region

One of the six geographic regions defined in Section 5.6.¶

Consensus Policy

A policy adopted by the Board under Section 5.7 that binds accredited Registry Operators and Registrars through their accreditation agreements.¶

Fundamental Commitments

The entrenched charter provisions listed in Section 13, amendable only under the highest decision threshold.¶

2.1. Name

The body is named the Agent Identity Authority, abbreviated AIA. The name is descriptive of the function (stewardship of agent identity infrastructure), contains no national, commercial, or ideological reference, and translates cleanly. "Authority" is used in the registry sense -- the authoritative source for a namespace, as in "certificate authority" and "numbering authority" -- and not in a regulatory sense.¶

One collision deserves acknowledgment: in X.509 PKI, "AIA" also abbreviates the Authority Information Access certificate extension, which appears throughout the hardware-attestation ecosystem this body serves. The collision was judged acceptable because the two usages never occupy the same grammatical position, but technical documents discussing certificate contents SHOULD write the body's name in full, or as "the Authority", where ambiguity could arise. No alternative name was found that preserved descriptiveness and neutrality without introducing a different collision.¶

2.2. Legal Form

The Authority SHALL be constituted as a non-profit, non-governmental membership association. The RECOMMENDED form is an association under Articles 60-79 of the Swiss Civil Code [SWISS-CC]: a legal personality created by adoption of statutes, with governance vested in a general assembly of members and an elected committee. This is the form used by ISO, the IEC, and numerous international technical and standards bodies, and it maps directly onto the membership-and-board structure defined in this document. The RIPE NCC's Dutch membership association [RIPE-ARTICLES] demonstrates the same pattern operating registry infrastructure for three decades.¶

Two alternatives were considered and rejected:¶

Treaty-based intergovernmental organization

Rejected. A treaty body admits only states, moves at the speed of diplomacy, and would relocate every technical decision into geopolitics. The multi-decade contrast between ICANN's policy velocity and treaty-body processes on comparable questions is the controlling precedent. A treaty form would also exclude precisely the constituencies -- operators, manufacturers, researchers, and civil society -- whose participation this document mandates.¶

National non-profit in a major power

Rejected as the founding form. ICANN's incorporation in California was, for its first two decades, the single largest source of challenge to its legitimacy, resolved only by the 2016 IANA stewardship transition and accountability reforms. A body whose universal participation is load-bearing (Section 6.2) should not begin with a jurisdictional handicap it must later engineer its way out of.¶

The Authority's statutes MUST provide that: it operates on a non-profit basis with no distribution of surplus to members; membership is open on objective criteria without regard to nationality; and dissolution transfers assets and escrowed data to a successor steward designated under Section 14, never to members or to any government.¶

2.3. Seat and Jurisdictional Neutrality

The Authority MUST be headquartered and legally constituted in a jurisdiction widely perceived as neutral, with a strong rule of law, an established ecosystem of international organizations, and no history of using domestic legal process to project policy onto global technical infrastructure. The RECOMMENDED seat is Geneva, Switzerland. Singapore is a suitable alternative, and the Formation Committee (Section 12) MAY select it, or another jurisdiction meeting the same criteria, after publishing a comparative analysis for public comment.¶

To bound residual jurisdictional risk, the Authority SHOULD, within three years of constitution, establish a secondary legal presence in a second neutral jurisdiction in a different region, capable of continuing the Authority's critical functions (trust store publication, escrow custody, accreditation administration) if the primary seat becomes untenable. See Section 16.3.¶

3.1. Mission Statement

The mission of the Agent Identity Authority is to steward the shared "aid" namespace and the trust framework on which it depends, for the benefit of all who rely on verifiable identity for autonomous entities. In service of that mission, and limited to it, the Authority:¶

1. maintains the "aid" URN formal namespace registration with IANA and acts as its registrant of record;¶
2. accredits Registry Operators and Registrars for Shared Namespaces, and administers their accreditation agreements;¶
3. publishes and maintains the Global Hardware Trust Store;¶
4. sets minimum standards for enrollment verification, anti-Sybil enforcement, data retention, and data escrow;¶
5. operates a dispute resolution framework for handle conflicts and complaints of Registrar or Registry Operator malpractice; and¶
6. allocates shared namespace labels, which never encode an operator or any other mutable attribute.¶

The Authority governs the registry, not the registered. It records that an identity exists and how it is anchored; it takes no position on what the identified entity does.¶

3.2. What the Authority Does Not Do

The Authority MUST NOT: assess, score, or publish opinions on the behavior, safety, or trustworthiness of any identified entity; condition identity issuance on the purpose, content, or politics of an agent's activity; operate or mandate any mechanism for remotely disabling an agent; regulate, license, or certify AI models or robotic products; or act as an agent of any government. Requests that the Authority perform such functions are, by this charter, out of scope, and declining them requires no Board action.¶

This narrowness is not modesty; it is the mechanism by which universal participation is possible (Section 6.2) and by which the Authority avoids becoming a single point of political control over autonomous systems worldwide.¶

3.3. Guiding Principles

Infrastructure, not regulation

The Authority manages names, roots of trust, and accreditation. Judgments about conduct belong to relying parties, reputation services, certifiers, and law -- layers above the one the Authority operates.¶

Legitimacy through neutrality

Like ICANN for domain names, the Authority's mandate rests on being the least-objectionable steward available, not on any state's endorsement. Every structural choice in this charter -- seat, funding, seat allocation, decision thresholds -- is evaluated against whether it preserves that neutrality.¶

Operational minimalism

The Authority remains as small as its enumerated functions permit. Scope expansion requires the highest decision threshold (Section 5.7), and the annual report MUST include a statement of any function performed that year that is not enumerated in Section 3.1, with justification. Scope creep, not incapacity, is the primary long-term institutional risk.¶

No single-party veto

No nation, region, company, or member holds a veto over any Authority decision. Consequential decisions require supermajorities that no single constituency can supply or block alone.¶

Sunlight as disinfectant

Deliberations, decisions, finances, and contracts are public by default (Section 10). The burden of justification falls on secrecy, never on disclosure.¶

Rough consensus, recorded dissent

Policy development seeks the strongest available consensus in the sense of [RFC7282], with minority positions recorded and published alongside adopted policy. Voting thresholds are the backstop, not the method.¶

4.1. Full Members

Full Membership is open to legal entities and, in the Civil Society and Academia group, natural persons, that demonstrate a bona fide operational, commercial, research, or public-interest stake in agent identity infrastructure and that self-assign to exactly one Stakeholder Group (Section 5.2). Full Members pay annual dues on a published, revenue-banded schedule with reduced bands for small organizations, academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and applicants headquartered in regions underrepresented in the membership.¶

For all voting purposes, an organization and its affiliates (entities under common control) count as a single Full Member and cast a single vote. The Authority MUST require affiliate disclosure at admission and annually thereafter; concealment of affiliation is grounds for suspension. This rule is the primary structural defense against electoral capture by a single firm registering many subsidiaries.¶

4.2. Associate Members

Associate Membership is open to any interested party at nominal or waived cost. Associate Members receive all public materials, participate in working groups and public comment, and may attend all open meetings, but do not vote in Stakeholder Group elections. Associate Membership is the intended on-ramp for individuals, students, and organizations evaluating deeper participation.¶

4.3. Observers

Observer status is reserved for governmental and intergovernmental participants and is exercised through the Government and Regulatory Advisory Committee (Section 5.9). Observers have voice -- the right to speak, to file advice, and to receive a reasoned written response -- but no vote and no Board seat. This mirrors the role of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee and is deliberate: government expertise is valuable; government control is disqualifying (Section 16.1).¶

4.4. Liaison Organizations

The Board MAY conclude liaison arrangements with standards and operational bodies whose work adjoins the Authority's, including the IETF and IAB, the W3C, the Trusted Computing Group, the FIDO Alliance, M3AAWG, FIRST, the Unicode Consortium, regional Internet registries, and robotics standards bodies. Liaisons receive a non-voting observer seat at Board meetings and reciprocal document exchange. Liaison arrangements MUST be published.¶

4.5. Admission, Suspension, and Termination

Admission decisions are made by staff against published objective criteria, with refusals appealable to the Independent Review Panel (Section 7.5). A member may be suspended or expelled only for cause stated in the bylaws (non-payment, affiliation fraud, sustained disruption of process), by two-thirds Board vote, with written reasons published and appeal available. Disagreement with Authority policy is never cause.¶

5.1. Composition

The Board consists of fifteen (15) voting Directors, allocated across Stakeholder Groups as follows, plus the non-voting participants listed in Section 5.3.¶

The allocation is designed so that supplier interests (Issuers plus the two manufacturer groups: seven seats) cannot outvote consumer and public interests (Infrastructure Operators and Relying Parties, Anti-Abuse, Civil Society, and the Independent Director: eight seats), and so that no single group approaches the eight votes an ordinary majority requires or the ten a supermajority requires.¶

5.2. Stakeholder Group Definitions

Issuers

Accredited Registry Operators and Registrars. No more than one of this group's three seats may be held by persons affiliated with Registry Operators, preventing the registry function -- a contracted monopoly within its namespace -- from dominating the constituency that oversees it.¶

Infrastructure Operators and Relying Parties

Operators of the systems that consume agent identity at scale: mailbox providers, cloud platforms, CDN and DNS operators, API platforms, and agent-to-agent platform operators. This group carries the operational knowledge of running registries and verification at Internet scale.¶

Hardware Security Manufacturers

Manufacturers of the roots of trust the system depends on: TPM vendors, smart card and security key vendors, and secure enclave designers. Members of this group are directly interested parties in Trust Store decisions and are subject to the recusal rules of Section 5.8.¶

Robotics and Embodied AI Manufacturers

Manufacturers and fleet operators of physical autonomous systems -- industrial AGVs, delivery and service robots, surgical and medical robotics, agricultural automation -- whose products are the long-horizon population of registered identities.¶

Anti-Abuse and Trust and Safety

Practitioners and organizations engaged in fighting messaging abuse, fraud, phishing, and coordinated inauthentic behavior, including participants in bodies such as M3AAWG and FIRST. This group exists because the Authority's core security property -- Sybil resistance -- is an anti-abuse property, and the people who fight abuse professionally are its most qualified auditors.¶

Civil Society and Academia

Digital rights organizations, privacy advocates, and academic researchers in identity, security, and AI governance. Natural persons are eligible for Full Membership in this group.¶

5.3. Non-Voting Participants

Government and Regulatory Advisory Committee chair

Attends Board meetings with voice (Section 5.9).¶

Liaison observers

Per Section 4.4.¶

Executive Director

The Authority's chief staff officer, ex officio, non-voting.¶

5.4. Terms and Rotation

Directors serve three-year terms, staggered so that one-third of seats (as nearly as allocation permits) turn over each year. The initial Board draws lots to assign one-, two-, and three-year initial terms within each Stakeholder Group. No person may serve more than two consecutive full terms; a former Director becomes eligible again after a break of one full term. A Director who changes employment such that their Stakeholder Group assignment would change MUST disclose the change; the seat is vacated if the group's members so petition and a majority of the Board concurs.¶

5.5. Election and Appointment Mechanisms

Each Stakeholder Group elects its Directors by vote of the Full Members assigned to that group, using the single transferable vote for multi-seat elections. Elections are administered by an Election Committee of members not standing for election, with published voter rolls (member names, not natural-person contact data), published candidate statements, and a published tally. A candidate need not be an employee of a member.¶

The Nominating Committee -- seven persons drawn by published procedure from the six Stakeholder Groups and the liaison community, none of whom may be a current Director -- appoints the Independent Director, and MUST use the appointment to remedy the Board's most significant gap in skills, geography, or independence at the time. The Nominating Committee also fills mid-term vacancies in any seat until the next scheduled election for that seat.¶

5.6. Geographic Diversity Requirements (Binding)

For the purposes of this charter the regions are: Africa; Asia-Pacific; Europe; Latin America and the Caribbean; Middle East; and North America. A Director's region is determined by country of primary professional domicile, declared at candidacy. The following constraints are binding on every election and appointment cycle, and the Election and Nominating Committees MUST resolve any conflict between raw election results and these constraints by the published rebalancing procedure (successive elimination of the lowest-ranked surplus candidate from the over-represented country or region):¶

• No single country may hold more than three (3) of the fifteen voting seats.¶
• No single region may hold a majority (eight or more) of the voting seats; the Authority SHOULD in practice keep every region at or below five.¶
• At least four (4) of the six regions MUST be represented among voting Directors at all times, and the Authority SHOULD strive for all six.¶
• Quorum for any Board decision requires Directors from at least three regions and at least four Stakeholder Groups.¶

5.7. Decision Rules

Ordinary business is decided by a majority of Directors present and voting, quorum per Section 5.6. The following require the affirmative vote of two-thirds of the full Board (ten of fifteen):¶

• adoption or amendment of a Consensus Policy binding on accredited parties;¶
• adoption of, or change to, the fee schedule (Section 11);¶
• revocation of an accreditation (Section 7);¶
• removal of a CA from the Global Hardware Trust Store, other than emergency removal subsequently ratified (Section 9);¶
• allocation of a new Shared Namespace;¶
• selection, material amendment, or termination of a Registry Operator agreement;¶
• the annual budget.¶

The following require the affirmative vote of three-quarters of the full Board (twelve of fifteen) AND ratification by a two-thirds vote of Full Members voting, with every Stakeholder Group's participation solicited:¶

• amendment of the bylaws;¶
• amendment of the Fundamental Commitments (Section 13);¶
• relocation of the Authority's seat;¶
• dissolution or merger.¶

No class of decision may be reserved to any single member, Stakeholder Group, government, or external body. The bylaws MUST NOT create golden shares, appointment rights for governments, or any mechanism by which one party can unilaterally block a decision the thresholds above would otherwise carry.¶

5.8. Conflict of Interest

Every Director MUST file, and annually update, a public disclosure of employment, directorships, and material financial interests in accredited parties, Trust Store applicants, and dispute-resolution providers. A Director MUST recuse from any matter in which the Director or the Director's employer has a direct financial interest -- including, for Hardware Security Manufacturer Directors, Trust Store decisions concerning their own or a direct competitor's roots. Recusals are recorded in the published minutes. Directors owe their duty to the Authority's mission, not to the constituency that elected them.¶

5.9. Government and Regulatory Advisory Committee

The Government and Regulatory Advisory Committee (GRAC) is open to representatives of national and subnational governments, intergovernmental organizations, AI governance bodies, robotics safety regulators, and digital identity authorities. Membership is open to any government without regard to its political system, recognition disputes notwithstanding; the GRAC's own rules of procedure handle representation questions, as the ICANN GAC's do.¶

The GRAC may issue formal advice to the Board on any matter within the Authority's mission. The Board MUST consider such advice and MUST respond in writing, with reasons, before finalizing the decision concerned; where the Board acts contrary to GRAC advice it MUST publish its reasons. GRAC advice is never binding, and GRAC participants hold no vote in any Authority process. This "voice without vote" design gives regulators a documented, legitimate channel -- and removes the argument that capture is the only way to be heard.¶

6.1. Recommended Expertise

The initial and ongoing composition of the Board, committees, and senior staff SHOULD, taken together, include people with the following backgrounds:¶

Anti-abuse and trust and safety practitioners

People with operational histories in fighting spam, phishing, fraud, and malware at scale -- the professional community found in M3AAWG (the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group), FIRST (the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams), and organizations in the lineage of StopBadware and the Global Cyber Alliance. The Authority's anti-Sybil mandate is, at bottom, an abuse-prevention mandate, and this community has decades of hard-won knowledge about how identity systems are gamed.¶

Robotics and embodied AI manufacturers

Engineers and executives from companies that build physical robots needing identity: industrial AGV makers, delivery robot companies, surgical and medical robot manufacturers, and agricultural automation firms. These are the parties for whom identity persistence across decades, ownership transfers, and component replacement is a product requirement rather than an abstraction.¶

Infrastructure operators

People who run the plumbing: large mailbox providers, cloud platforms, CDN operators, and DNS registry operators -- in particular, people with first-hand experience operating registries at 99.99% availability, running escrow, and surviving registry transitions. Governance of registry infrastructure by people who have never operated one is a known failure mode.¶

Hardware security experts

Practitioners from TPM manufacturers (for example Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Nuvoton), smart card and security key vendors (for example Yubico, Thales), and secure enclave designers (for example Apple, Arm), along with independent evaluators familiar with Common Criteria and FIPS 140-3 evaluation. Trust Store decisions are engineering judgments before they are policy judgments.¶

Civil society and digital rights

Privacy advocates, digital rights organizations, and academic researchers in AI governance, security, and identity. This community is the structural counterweight to industry interests and the institutional memory of how identity infrastructure has previously been repurposed for surveillance.¶

Government and regulatory observers

Non-voting, with voice, through the GRAC (Section 5.9): participants from AI governance bodies, robotics safety regulators, and digital identity authorities. Their presence keeps the Authority informed of regulatory developments and keeps regulators informed of what the infrastructure can and cannot do -- without conferring control.¶

6.2. Geography, Language, and Universal Participation

Beyond the binding rules of Section 5.6, the following recommendations apply:¶

• No single country or region should hold a majority of Board seats under any circumstance, including transient vacancy conditions; committees and senior staff should observe the same discipline even though the binding rules address only the Board.¶
• At least four, and ideally all six, of the regions -- Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East, and North America -- should be represented on the Board at all times, and the Nominating Committee should treat persistent absence of any region as the gap its appointments exist to fix. Fee reductions and travel support should be used deliberately to build membership in underrepresented regions rather than waiting for it to arrive.¶
• The Authority should be headquartered and legally constituted in a jurisdiction perceived as neutral; Switzerland and Singapore are the recommended options (Section 2.3).¶
• The working language is English. Charters, Consensus Policies, dispute-resolution policies, annual reports, and public-comment summaries should also be published in the official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish), and public comment should be accepted in any of them.¶
• Plenary and Board meetings should rotate across time zones on a published schedule so that no region's participants bear a permanent 03:00 burden, and every meeting should support remote participation with equal standing to in-room participation.¶
• Nations with different political systems are explicitly welcome as GRAC participants, and their nationals as members, candidates, and Directors. The Authority governs machine identity infrastructure -- a provenance ledger for hardware-anchored identifiers -- not political speech, content, or human rights adjudication. This neutrality is load-bearing: an identity substrate that only one geopolitical bloc will use is not infrastructure, it is a bloc artifact, and it invites the creation of a rival incompatible substrate. The DNS remained singular because participation never required political alignment; this Authority should hold the same line.¶
• Participation in the Authority should never require, and should never be read to imply, alignment with any geopolitical bloc, alliance, or sanctions regime. Where the law of the Authority's seat compels a restriction, the Authority should apply it as narrowly as that law permits, publish what it has done and why, and treat recurring compulsion as evidence bearing on the continuity planning of Section 16.3.¶

7.1. Scope

Accreditation is required for any party operating as a Registry Operator or Registrar within a shared namespace. Accreditation criteria are published, objective, and applied equally; onboarding is permissionless in the sense that no incumbent's approval is required.¶

7.2. Criteria

Accreditation criteria MUST be objective, published, and applied without regard to the applicant's nationality. They incorporate the requirements of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-registry] -- for Registrars: verified capability to perform hardware attestation for at least three of the five hardware types, an OIDC-compliant token service, the provisioning client interface of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-epp], minimum data-retention and privacy standards, enrollment tooling, annual compliance audit, and a financial bond or insurance covering escrow and wind-down; for Registry Operators: availability commitments, non-discriminatory provisioning access for all accredited Registrars, fingerprint-index integrity, daily escrow deposits per [I-D.drake-agent-identity-epp], and annual security audit by an Authority-approved assessor -- plus demonstration of organizational and financial stability proportionate to the role.¶

7.3. Application and Review

1. The applicant files a public application (with narrowly-scoped confidential annexes for security and financial detail) and pays a published application fee.¶
2. Authority staff and an approved independent assessor conduct technical and security review, including live verification of attestation handling against test devices of each claimed hardware type.¶
3. The application is posted for a thirty-day public comment period; comments and staff responses are published.¶
4. Staff issue a reasoned decision. Approvals are effective on execution of the standard accreditation agreement, which incorporates Consensus Policies by reference.¶
5. Refusals are appealable (Section 7.5).¶

Standard agreements MUST be uniform: individually negotiated side terms with particular accredited parties are prohibited, closing the favored-operator channel through which registry regimes have historically been captured.¶

7.4. Ongoing Compliance, Suspension, and Revocation

Accredited parties undergo annual audits and MUST report material security incidents within seventy-two hours of determination. Escalating enforcement applies: notice and cure period; suspension of new-enrollment rights; revocation. Revocation requires a two-thirds Board vote (Section 5.7) and triggers the registrar-failure transition of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-epp]: sponsored identities are transferred to accredited successors, using escrowed data where the failed party does not cooperate, such that no enrolled identity is stranded by its Issuer's failure. Enforcement actions and their reasons are published.¶

7.5. Appeals: the Independent Review Panel

The Authority MUST maintain an Independent Review Panel (IRP) of at least seven jurists and technical experts, appointed by the Board for staggered five-year non-renewable terms, none of whom may be a Director, staff member, or affiliate of an accredited party. Accreditation refusals, enforcement actions, membership refusals and expulsions, and claims that the Board has acted outside this charter are appealable to a three-person IRP panel, whose decisions on charter conformance bind the Board. IRP procedures, filings, and decisions are public.¶

8.1. Agent Handle Dispute Resolution Policy

The Authority MUST adopt and maintain an Agent Handle Dispute Resolution Policy (AHDRP), incorporated by reference into every handle registration in a Shared Namespace, modeled on ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy [UDRP] with the substantive adaptations the identity architecture requires.¶

A complainant prevails by establishing each of the following, mirroring the UDRP's three-part test:¶

1. the handle is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark, well-known service name, or protected designation in which the complainant has rights;¶
2. the handle's registrant has no rights or legitimate interests in the handle; and¶
3. the handle was registered and is being used in bad faith.¶

The only available remedy is permanent retirement of the handle. A handle MUST NOT be transferred to the complainant or to any other identity, and a retired handle string MUST NOT ever be registered again by any identity. This departs deliberately from the UDRP, whose principal remedy is transfer, because handles alias non-transferable identities: transferring a handle would transfer accumulated recognition to a different entity, violating the indelibility principle of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-registry]. The retire-only remedy also eliminates the economics of handle squatting -- a squatter can never profit from a dispute, because the asset is destroyed rather than conveyed -- while fully protecting mark holders, whose interest is the removal of the infringing name from use. The losing registrant's identity, canonical URN, reputation history, and authentication capability are unaffected; only the alias is withdrawn.¶

Procedural provisions follow the UDRP pattern: disputes are heard by panels of one or three panelists convened by Authority-approved independent providers; the complainant bears provider fees (both parties share them when the respondent elects a three-member panel); proceedings are conducted in writing; decisions are published in full; and implementation of a retirement is stayed for ten business days to permit either party to commence court proceedings, which are never precluded by the AHDRP. The Authority MUST approve at least two providers in different regions, and MUST publish panelist rosters and per-panelist outcome statistics.¶

Registry Operators MAY implement a sunrise period at Shared Namespace launch during which holders of registered trademarks may register matching handles ahead of general availability, under Authority-published sunrise rules.¶

8.2. Malpractice Complaints

Complaints that an accredited party has violated its agreement or a Consensus Policy -- including alleged violations of the anti-Sybil invariants -- are filed with Authority compliance staff, investigated on a published timeline, and resolved under Section 7.4, with IRP appeal available to both complainant and respondent. Remedies run against the accredited party and the record, never against an identity: per [I-D.drake-agent-identity-registry], a finding of fraudulent enrollment is recorded as an annotation on the affected records, and no Authority process can decommission, suspend, or impair an identity's authentication or resolution.¶

9.1. Inclusion Criteria

A manufacturer CA is eligible for inclusion when the manufacturer demonstrates, in a public application:¶

• publicly distributed root CA certificates and a documented hierarchy;¶
• hardware security evaluation of the key-bearing components (Common Criteria at EAL4 or above, FIPS 140-2 or 140-3, or an equivalent scheme accepted by the Board on published technical advice);¶
• a certificate practice statement covering key generation, protection, issuance, and lifecycle;¶
• a commitment to incident disclosure to the Authority within seventy-two hours of determining that CA key compromise or systemic mis-issuance has occurred; and¶
• a named security contact and cooperation with periodic review.¶

Inclusion decisions MUST be made on technical criteria only. The nationality of a manufacturer, and the political system of its home jurisdiction, are not criteria; a root earns inclusion by evaluation evidence and practice, wherever it is made. This rule is a direct application of the neutrality principle and is entrenched as a Fundamental Commitment (Section 13).¶

9.2. Publication, Audit, and Review

The Trust Store is published at a well-known endpoint, signed with an Authority key held under the threshold arrangements of Section 17.1, mirrored by Registry Operators, and maintained as a public version-controlled repository with a complete change history. Every inclusion, every parameter change, and every removal appears in the history with its rationale. Included manufacturers undergo review at least every three years, and the Authority MAY commission targeted audits on evidence of concern.¶

9.3. Removal

Removal of a CA requires a two-thirds Board vote after publication of a reasoned removal proposal and at least thirty days of public comment, except that the Authority's security function MAY execute an emergency removal immediately upon credible evidence of CA key compromise, subject to Board ratification within thirty days (failing which the removal lapses). Removal is prospective: it bars new enrollments against the removed root. Identities already anchored to devices under a removed root are not revoked -- identity is never revoked -- but the Authority MUST publish the removal so that Relying Parties can apply their own policy, and SHOULD publish migration guidance for affected device populations. Deprecation timelines for non-emergency removals SHOULD be long enough that deployed fleets are not stranded.¶

12.1. Phase 0: Formation Committee

Formation begins with an open, publicly announced call for a Formation Committee of nine to fifteen volunteers, collectively spanning at least five of the six Stakeholder Group profiles and at least four regions, with no single organization (with affiliates) holding more than one seat and no single country holding more than three. Initial implementers of the companion specifications are expected and welcome participants but MUST NOT constitute a majority. The Formation Committee's mandate is limited to: drafting statutes and bylaws implementing this document; running at least two public comment rounds of at least forty-five days each on those drafts; selecting the seat per Section 2.3; incorporating the Authority; and administering the first membership drive and first elections.¶

12.2. Phase 1: Interim Governance

Upon incorporation, the Formation Committee serves as the interim board with enumerated, limited powers: admitting members, appointing the Election Committee, adopting an interim budget, and preparing -- but not deciding -- the Registry Operator selection process and initial policy drafts. The interim board MUST NOT allocate any Shared Namespace, MUST NOT declare global operational, MUST NOT adopt Consensus Policies, and MUST NOT enter contracts exceeding twelve months. Interim service is a disqualification from candidacy in the first Board election, removing the incentive to entrench.¶

12.3. Phase 2: First Board

First elections proceed when at least four Stakeholder Groups each have at least five Full Members from at least two regions. Each qualified group elects its seats under Section 5.5; seats of not-yet-qualified groups are filled by the first Nominating Committee for one-year terms and revert to election as their groups qualify. The geographic constraints of Section 5.6 bind from the first election. The seated first Board draws lots for staggered initial terms and assumes full powers; the interim board dissolves.¶

12.4. Bootstrap-Era Operators

The interim Registry Operator and bootstrap-era Registrars are the system's proving ground, and their experience is an input to governance formation, not a claim on its outcome:¶

• Operational evidence from the bootstrap era -- enrollment failure modes, attestation edge cases, abuse patterns, escrow practice -- SHALL be solicited by the Formation Committee and MUST inform the first accreditation criteria and minimum standards.¶
• Registrars that operated during bootstrap and passed a voluntary independent audit qualify for an expedited accreditation review track: the same criteria and the same public comment, on a compressed timeline that credits already-audited evidence. Expedited review is procedural, never a preferential outcome.¶
• Bootstrap-era operators, their customers, and their personnel are eligible for membership, the Formation Committee, and Board candidacy on the same terms as anyone else -- and no party, including the interim Registry Operator, is precluded from competing in the Registry Operator selection.¶
• Identities enrolled during bootstrap are unaffected by the transition: canonical identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered, so the handover of the registry role strands no one.¶

12.5. Phase 3: Registry Operator Selection and Launch Preparation

The first Board conducts an open, competitive, criteria-published selection for the global Registry Operator, with independent technical evaluation and public comment on the evaluation report before award. In parallel it adopts the initial Consensus Policies (enrollment minimums, anti-Sybil enforcement, data retention), publishes Trust Store version 1, adopts the AHDRP and appoints providers, stands up the IRP, and establishes escrow operations under Section 17.¶

12.6. Transition Criteria for Declaring "global" Operational

The Board declares the global namespace operational only when all of the following are true, and the declaration itself requires a two-thirds vote:¶

1. the Authority is legally constituted per Section 2 and its first elected Board is seated in compliance with Section 5.6;¶
2. a Registry Operator has been selected through the open process of Section 12.5 and has passed pre-launch technical audit, including fingerprint-index serialization testing;¶
3. at least three Registrars, under at least three distinct ownership groups and from at least two regions, are accredited and integration-tested;¶
4. Trust Store version 1 is published and signed;¶
5. the AHDRP is in force with at least two approved providers;¶
6. escrow deposits are flowing and a restoration exercise from escrow has been successfully performed; and¶
7. a final thirty-day public comment on launch readiness has completed with published disposition.¶

Before this declaration, global operates under the interim Registry Operator's published commitments; the declaration marks the completed transfer of the registry role into Authority governance, with no identity renumbering and no interruption of verification.¶

12.7. Timeline Expectations

Indicative, not binding: Phase 0, six to nine months; Phase 1, three to six months; Phase 2, three to six months; Phase 3, six to twelve months -- a total of eighteen to thirty-three months from the formation call to an operational global namespace. The 2016 IANA stewardship transition and the launch histories of new gTLD registries suggest these ranges are realistic. The bootstrap design removes schedule pressure deliberately: because global delivers full identity service under the interim operator's commitments in the interim, the Authority can afford to be constituted correctly rather than quickly, and every phase gate above is a quality gate, not a date.¶

16.1. Governance Capture

Capture vectors and their designed counters:¶

Electoral capture by a firm

Affiliate aggregation (one firm, one vote; Section 4.1); seat caps per Stakeholder Group; the supplier/consumer seat balance of Section 5.1; and term limits.¶

Financial capture

The five-percent contribution cap, the government funding prohibition, transaction-fee-based core revenue, the twelve-month reserve, and full revenue disclosure (Section 11, Section 10).¶

State capture

Non-voting governmental participation (Section 5.9); the neutral seat; entrenched nationality-neutrality; and the succession procedure of Section 14, which makes seizure of the legal shell unrewarding because the community can re-home the function.¶

Procedural capture

Uniform accreditation agreements (no side deals); supermajorities no constituency can supply alone; the IRP as a binding charter-conformance check; and mandatory publication, which converts quiet influence into documented influence.¶

Capture by the founders

Interim-board power limits and the bar on interim members standing in the first election (Section 12.2); expedited-process-only credit for bootstrap issuers (Section 12.4); and open Registry Operator competition.¶

16.2. Single Point of Failure

The Authority concentrates functions that the registry architecture identifies as necessarily singular. A captured, compromised, or merely defunct Authority would degrade the entire shared namespace. The registry architecture's survivability guarantees bound the damage: no Authority failure can un-exist an identity or defeat verification, which runs against Issuer keys and enrolled hardware, never against the Authority. Mitigations: the continuity plan and annual exercise of Section 14; signed, mirrored, publicly version-controlled Trust Store publication, so that a last-known-good state survives the Authority (Section 9.2); escrow custody under threshold cryptography spanning jurisdictions (Section 17.1); and the pre-designated successor-steward procedure. Relying parties SHOULD note that Authority unavailability does not interrupt identity verification: tokens verify against Issuer keys, not against the Authority, and the Authority sits outside every request path.¶

16.3. Jurisdictional Risk

Any legal seat exposes the Authority to that seat's compulsion: sanctions regimes, court orders, and national security process could be directed at accreditation decisions, Trust Store composition, or escrowed data. Mitigations: seat selection per Section 2.3; the secondary-jurisdiction presence; threshold escrow keys held by custodians in multiple jurisdictions, so that no single jurisdiction's process can compel decryption (Section 17.1); narrow application of any compelled restriction with published disclosure of what was compelled, to the extent disclosure is lawful, and publication of annual legal-process statistics; and the Fundamental Commitment that nationality is not a criterion, which denies domestic legal actors a policy hook inside the charter itself. Persistent compulsion that forces the Authority to violate its Fundamental Commitments is grounds for the Board to activate relocation under Section 5.7.¶

16.4. Authority Key Compromise

The Authority's signing key (Trust Store) and escrow decryption key are its highest-value secrets. Both MUST be generated and held in hardware security modules under M-of-N threshold control (RECOMMENDED: 3-of-5) with custodians in at least three jurisdictions, exercised only in logged, witnessed ceremonies whose records are published. Compromise of the Trust Store signing key is handled by published emergency rotation with out-of-band verification paths for mirrors; compromise of the escrow key requires re-encryption of deposits under a successor key, which the escrow format of [I-D.drake-agent-identity-epp] permits.¶

17.1. Escrow Custody

• Deposits remain encrypted at rest; the Authority MUST NOT maintain any routinely decrypted copy or derived cleartext index.¶
• The escrow decryption capability is held under the threshold arrangements of Section 16.4; decryption is possible only in a logged ceremony requiring custodians from multiple jurisdictions.¶
• Decryption is permitted only for: (a) emergency succession or Registry Operator / Registrar failover under Section 7.4 and the emergency-succession provisions of the registry architecture; (b) an audit or dispute determination that the Board has ordered under published policy (for example, adjudicating an alleged anti-Sybil violation); or (c) a restoration exercise under Section 14, performed against test partitions wherever feasible.¶
• Every decryption event -- its ground, scope, and the custodians participating -- is logged and disclosed in the annual report, with per-event publication except where a brief deferral is necessary to complete a failover safely.¶
• Decrypted material is minimized to the identities the triggering event concerns, handled in isolated environments, and destroyed on completion, with destruction attested in the ceremony log.¶

17.2. Other Data

By architecture, the Authority never receives authentication logs, token-issuance records, message content, or Relying Party interaction data; the separation of identity issuance from behavior observation in the companion specifications is mirrored institutionally here, and the Authority MUST decline data feeds that would erode it. Dispute and accreditation files may contain personal data of natural persons (complainants, registrant contacts, operator emails); the Authority publishes decisions with natural-person data minimized, retains case files only for published retention periods, and applies the seat jurisdiction's data protection law as a floor, not a ceiling. Membership rolls published for election integrity name members, not natural-person contact details.¶