Enhancing anonymity via market competition

Anonymity is an important issue in the cyberspace community. Previous solutions typically rely on a well-defined trust structure - a set of distributed trustees among whom at least a quorum are supposed to be honest. We argue that the establishment of such a distributed trust structure is beyond the scope of technology itself. We propose an institutional framework within which service providers compete to provide high quality anonymity, and users can customize their anonymity according to their personal priorities. The major contribution of this paper is the incorporation of market competition into anonymity system models.