Names are incredibly slippery.
You could mean that a location-independent name may be associated with something or associated with nothing. You can use the identity as a unique token for comparison purposes. A name may be associated with something that we don't expect to ever track down electronically, such as a non-cyberspace object, as Mark Fisher mentioned. But even here, there might be some electronic metadata to track down. A name that is associated with something is still useful even if it provides no hints for how to resolve it.