2idi, a Concord, California company, has plans to stop spam by moving you from the Internet to a private network.

Using OASIS XRI (Extensible Resource Identifiers ) and XDI technology, which in turn is built on XML technology, the package is essentially another flavor of peer-to-peer networking.

What 2idi is proposing is a network where you can have your own i.d. through which you have your own private email address, you can update your contact information and contacts can look you up, and where your contact information is "brokered" by a trusted gatekeeper called, simply enough, an "ibroker".  The role of the ibroker is to protect your contact information and only allow those whom you've permitted to have access to you.

Somehow, this doesn't really sound any different than Ryze, Orkut, or Linked-In, other than that people external to the network can send email to your internal network i.d..

Eventually 2idi expects that you will be able to use your i.d. for things such as filling in web forms with one click, and using the i.d. to "register and login with the same name everywhere. The website will simply ask your i-broker to authenticate you, so your i-broker account password is all you need."

I dunno, that's putting an awful lot of eggs in one basket.  My Safari already does all of those things for me, or things close enough to afford the same ease, without  my having to trust an ibroker.  And there can be dozens of ibrokers.

In the end, this may be useful for people who do not already have an Internet presence, but otherwise it seems to involve not only one more change of email address to tell everyone about, but indeed a change in how those people all think about contacting you.

And there is no guarantee that a spammer won't fool the ibroker and get their spam to you, or, indeed, that someone won't sign up as a spambroker.