Ed,
Global unique namespaces and the DNS are not equivalent
concetps, although the latter provides an example of the former. Also
note that naming of organizations under COM is a bad example of the
principles I advocated, i.e., the names are generally too short to be
descriptive in a global environment. The preferred approach, which many
organizations outside of the U.S. have adopted, is to register under
a country name, and then under a state or provence or locality
name, to provide further differentiation and to minimize the potential
for bottlenecks in name registration that you allude to. So, the COM
domain under the DNS is not a very good example of the sort of global,
descriptive naming I referred to.
As for the virtues of PGP vs. PEM in the commercial
marketplace, only time will definatively decide that question.
Steve