Second verification pass: fifty-four registers, and two countries that already issued the keys
Seven registers added across North America, Europe and Asia. The pattern that keeps repeating is a state that has already built the cryptography and still publishes no file.
The index now carries fifty-four registers across thirty-seven jurisdictions and forty-three trades. Seven rows were added in this pass, each checked by hand against the authority’s own published pages on 10 November 2026. The pass went deliberately wide rather than deep, because nobody knows which authority moves first and a table that only covers the places this lab already understands is not evidence of anything.
Two of the new rows are grade B and both arrived by a route worth noticing. New York publishes active real estate salespersons and brokers as a dataset on the state’s general open data portal rather than as a feature of the licensing register, in CSV, JSON and XML at fixed addresses. California publishes every licensed contractor as a free master list in three files, one of which lists the people attached to each licence rather than only the licence. In neither case did somebody persuade a regulator to build an API. A general policy applied to a state agency, and the file fell out. That is a cheaper path to tier A than any amount of arguing with a licensing board, and it is the one this lab should be pointing authorities at.
The United Kingdom supplies the clearest priced gate in the table. Anyone may search the medical register free, and the General Medical Council describes it as the only up-to-date publicly accessible database of every doctor eligible to practise in the country. The bulk file already exists in exactly the shape RVW-5 tier A asks for: the whole register daily, delta files seven days a week, CSV over SFTP. It costs eight hundred and fifteen pounds a year plus VAT, and republishing any of it requires a second licence granted only after the GMC has understood the intended use. Nothing technical is missing. A register first printed as a book in 1859 now ships a daily machine-readable diff, and what stands between it and a signed public file is a price list.
The finding that repeats, and which this lab did not expect to find twice in one pass, is a state that has already issued the keys. Germany gave every lawyer a chip card carrying a signature certificate and an identifier inside the judiciary’s electronic communication infrastructure. The national official directory is free to inspect by statute, and criminal procedure law requires courts and prosecutors to use it when appointing defence counsel, so the state has already decided this register is authoritative enough to bind a court. It publishes no file. That is the Estonian finding again, in an entirely different administration: sign the artefact, not the channel. Two independent confirmations in two passes is no longer a curiosity, it is the shape of the problem.
Austria is the control for Germany. It replaced fourteen provincial trade registers with one national system in 2015, gave every trade licence a national number, wrote free public access into the trade statute so no reason need be given, and published an interface specification with version numbers. It is the best equipped grade D in the index and there is still nothing to hash. One country fixed the fragmentation and did not publish; its neighbour never fixed it and does not publish either. The professional cannot prove anything in either place.
Maharashtra contributes the most honest number in the whole index. Registration is compulsory under the 2016 national statute, each of more than thirty states and territories runs its own authority and portal, and Maharashtra has registered more than fifty thousand agents in eight years while publishing that fewer than thirty-two thousand are currently active. A register publishing its own decay rate, better than a third of its entries lapsed, is the argument for RVW-6 made by the register itself. The federal split that produces this is now the commonest failure mode in the table, shared by Brazil, Spain, India and the United States.
The Philippines supplies the sentence this lab will reuse. The Real Estate Service Act already requires a practitioner to carry their registration and licence details on every document they sign, use or issue, which is the subject, the trade, the licence reference and the issuing body, mandated by law, on every piece of paper. What exists to check it against is a free search form the Commission itself warns may be delayed or wrong. Its own framing of why that matters: the card can be perfectly genuine and the registration still lapsed, because the card is not the licence, the registry is. Which is the entire argument for making the registry publishable as something a machine can keep.
Still missing, and unchanged since the first pass: archived copies of the evidence with their digests published beside each row. Until that exists a row can be argued with but not checked against a frozen copy. Corrections are wanted, particularly from anyone who works inside one of these fifty-four.