The domain name system already handles this by enforcing uniqueness and leveraging the market.
As you point out, there are plenty of real businesses with names similar to each other. And yet, they all manage to do business with their customers. How does it work? Because customers use more than just a name to recognize a business.
IMO this is a good example of how the goalposts have been moved on EV certs over time. They were never intended to solve name uniqueness globally, so IMO it’s silly to complain that they don’t.
Why don’t we include, in the EV cert, enough info to uniquely identify a business? E.g. the jurisdiction of business registration + the business registration number?
I was surprised how easy it was to get an EV cert. The validators work from an offshore call-center and use sites like whitepages.com to lookup the business. They then call the number listed (you could have updated the listing just before). When they call you simply have to say "I am ... and my position is X at Y company. Then hand the phone to someone else who says something similar". There was no individual identity verification.
Banks which have the same name as other banks should change their name, but we should tie EVs for banks to existing financial system institutions. For example, most banks in the US have an FDIC number, so our EV validators in the US can tie a bank to it's FDIC registration, and the user can cross-reference their bank with that as well. Basically if I'm a bank customer, I should have a unique identifier on my check or debit card which can be cross-referenced with the EV cert.
The vast majority of consumers are not going to lookup an FDIC number, and even if they did, it is still not optimal since banks regularly merge which would cause confusion.
