[vjk800]

> There is no reason a scheme like this can't simply be a standard from some appropriate body, and a few open source reference implementations.

Yet no-one did this and I think that's the point here.

World is full of rent seeking in the form of stuff that is dead simple to do but no-one does without a financial incentive.

In w3w the hard part is not the system itself, but getting people to use it, which must be done because the value of the system comes from the network effect.