I recently read Guidelines for future hypertext systems (via). Among other issues, I was sad but not surprised to see that it was suggesting an idea for access control that is perpetually tempting to technical people. I'll quote it:

All byte spans are available to any user with a proper address. However, they may be encrypted, and access control can be performed via the distribution of keys for decrypting the content at particular permanent addresses.

This is in practice a terrible and non-workable idea, because practical access control requires the ability to revoke access, not just to grant it. When the only obstacle preventing people from accessing a thing is a secret or two, people's access can only move in one direction; once someone learns the secret, they have perpetual access to the thing. With no ability to selectively revoke access, at best you can revoke everyone's access by destroying the thing itself.

(If the thing itself is effectively perpetual too, you have a real long term problem. Any future leak of the secret allows future people to access your thing, so to keep your thing secure you must keep your secret secure in perpetuity. We have proven to be terrible at this; at best we can totally destroy the secret, which of course removes our own access to the thing too.)

Access control through encryption keys has a mathematical simplicity that appeals to people, and sometimes they are tempted to wave away the resulting practical problems with answers like 'well, just don't lose control of the keys' (or even 'don't trust anyone you shouldn't have', which has the useful virtue of being obviously laughable). These people have forgotten that security is not math, security is people, and so a practical security system must cope with what actually happens in the real world. Sooner or later something always goes wrong, and when it does we need to be able to fix it without blowing up the world.

(In the real world we have seen various forms of access control systems without revocation fail repeatedly. Early NFS is one example.)