You're hiding an unbounded amount of work under the word "publish" there. The important part of an identity is the part where people trust that someone using the identity is you. Just posting "hey, this is the public key for John Smith" on a website does nothing to prove that fact. (Key-signing parties prove that fact, but people don't do those.)

What does prove that fact is the background-check a CA does. But they only do it to create a private notion of your identity for themselves, which means that every CA has to do its own redundant background check, which is why certs cost money.

All I'm suggesting, here, is that the "background checking to create an ID number that maps to a specific person" part could be split off into its own business model, and the resulting ID number (in the form of an OpenID, or whatever else) reused by any-and-all organizations that wish to map tokens to real people.

Also:

> I believe, any sane person wants to be a source of their identity (that's asserted by others), not to lease their very identity from a third party.

You're never the source of your identity. For example, your name is only your name because the government you were born under has a law creating an identity, by mapping birth certificates to people, and your name is one aspect of that identity. Change citizenship from the US to China? Suddenly what you were considering "your name" is no more, and your new name is spelled in ideographs. You can certainly get people to call you by your old, alphabetic name--but that is a person-to-token mapping. In any token-to-person mapping--a phonebook, for example--you'll be found by your new government-created identity.