[YorickPeterse]

Honestly these questions are not that hard to answer. Just look at the likes of GitHub, GitLab, or really any source code hosting platform that supports the creation of groups.

> How do we decide which person/entity gets a namespace?

You get a personal one, named after your user account. In addition, you can create up to N namespaces. After that, you either have to request more or pay a small fee. This prevents namespace squatting, while still giving you the option to register a few for specific projects.

> What if there's a dispute?

First come first serve seems pretty reasonable. Just because your company is named X doesn't mean you have a perpetual and exclusive right to use that name wherever you want.

> What do we do about all the currently un-namespaced crates?

You would have to leave them, and perhaps disallow un-namespaced crates after a certain point of time. Maybe take a look at how NPM handled thsi.

> How would Rust (the language) understand namespaces?

A crate `foo/bar`, with `foo` being the namespace, should just translate to something like `use foo::bar`.

[Drdrdrq]

You mean like this?

> Just because your company is named Microsoft doesn't mean you have a perpetual and exclusive right to use that name wherever you want.

Hmmm. :)

[YorickPeterse]

There's a thing called trademarks, and the case is indeed different for those. But even in that case, one would have to file some sort of dispute; you don't necessarily get to use the name everywhere forever, no questions asked.