> Any computer can generate a private/public key pair, which is all you need for identify.

Right, but once you've generated those, then what? You need a global registry of sorts so people can lookup each others keys for example, which is why DNS kind of is the best we have available today.

I don't think there is any perfect solution here, but it's hard to come up with something that has better trade-offs than DNS. Sure, ICANN might be based in the US, but so far DNS been relatively safe to rely on, and if ends up not reliable in the future, I'm not sure social media profiles is the biggest worry at that point.