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Here's the short answer. These are all major types of persistent identifiers. Among them, ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to use in about 24 hours. Over 500 registered organizations have created an estimated 3.2 billion ARKs in the world, and no one has ever paid for the right to create them. That is not to say that keeping identifiers persistent is free of the usual costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, etc.
Is there a longer answer to that question?
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There is nothing inherent in ARKs, DOIs, Handles, PURLs, or URNs that make them more or less suitable to identify anything any kind of thing in any field, domain, or sector. In that sense they are all equally suitable.
Where they differ are in the nature of services and sociology and buzz. xxx
any of these identifier It is hard to generalize how people use these identifiers. DOIs, for example, used to be known primarily as identifiers for scientific and scholarly publications, with a mature community and service offering around "Crossref DOIs", but newer kinds of DOIs, such as those from DataCite and EIDR, are changing the nature of the DOI.
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