Key Discovery Made Simple

[Robert J. Hansen]

> "Most of our users" are not the target audience for the description on how
> to setup the Web Key Service.  Obviously this is for sysadmins and geeks
> running their own mail servers.

I want to be careful about my criticism here, because it's really easy to
sound like I'm telling someone else what they should have volunteered to
work on for free instead.  That annoys me when other people do it to me, and
I want to be careful I'm not doing it to you.

I'm having a hard time imagining why a mail provider would adopt WKD when
probably less than 1% of their userbase uses OpenPGP in the first place.
Sure, I can see it for the geek elite who run their own domains,
mailservers, and webservers with TLS.  I can imagine a couple of fringe
players in the mail space might adopt it.  But I can't imagine adoption
beyond a small niche of the GnuPG community, which is *already* a really
small niche.  Carving out niches of niches does not strike me as a
productive way to expand the userbase.

The big players have already chimed in on OpenPGP.  Last year there was talk
from Google and Yahoo on the IETF WG list about how they were going to
introduce OpenPGP support to their mail clients, but they've been
conspicuously silent lately.  I know Cistercians who make more noise.  Does
Gmail even have one project member subscribed to this list and following the
conversations?