After reading through this long, interesting conversation, I would like to suggest the following questions to frame this discussion. Von 1) What CAs do we wish to consider as potential issuers for our community? Is it just "Grid CAs" (by that I mean CA we can reasonably except to adhere to best practices as specified by GGF WGs) or do we want to also consider CAs that we have no reasonable expectation of being able to impact their policies or procedures (e.g. commercial CAs) as potential issuers for our community as well? 2) Do we believe that during normal operation the CAs indicated in the response to the first question have policy that will result in their issuing globally unique names and will reliably follow that policy? 3) If a CA is compromised, given currently implementations, this will result in the compromise of all certificates issued by that CA. An additional threat that a CA compromise would result in, is the compromise of privileges bound to certificates issued by other CAs, at relying parties that trust the compromised CA. Is this threat of concern to us?