The Petname System

Exactly! That’s the subject of a Public Persona that I was trying to figure out here which lead me to here.

That second link is their proposal on how to handle it. The Petname System is a replacement for that proposition, and is therefore directly incompatible with it. However, similar to @dirvine’s proposal, it has the ability (as I think you figured out) to be applicable to both the data location and public persona systems.

In the existing DNS system, the name cnn.com is globally unique, verifiably owned, and human-memorable. Zooko’s triangle states that if a system is to be decentralized, it is impossible for a single identifier to have all three properties at the same time. The Petname System cannot provide a single identifier that is all three without disproving Zooko’s triangle. So it does the next best thing, it implements a system that uses only two of the three properties at any given time.