You're talking about global PKI. But the "public" in PKI doesn't imply global any more than the public in public-key cryptography does. What PKI does usually i

You're talking about global PKI. But the "public" in PKI doesn't imply global any more than the public in public-key cryptography does. What PKI does usually imply is some sort of top-down tree of trust and mechanisms and policy for managing and verifying that tree. But the roots of that tree of trust don't have to be global, and with the exception of Web PKI aren't. You're creating the straw man. You keep saying that new protocols don't need PKI. Well, if we accept your criteria for what PKI means, and considering that the only example that meets your criteria, past, present, or future, is Web PKI, then what exactly is the point of your argument? If you have a beef against PKIX, CMS, X.509, ASN.1 etc--i.e. the mechanisms--then just say so. There's a ton of reasonable criticism to be made there. But those things are not equivalent to "PKI". There are plenty of PKI systems out there that make use of alternative mechanisms, though mostly proprietary and hidden as interoperability usually demands making use of pre-existing standards. But, to reiterate, using those standards to build a PKI system absolutely does not require relying on the same global roots of trusts. Nothing in those standards even identifies such a root or the shape of the tree at all.