Yeah, my idea is similar to Kafka messaging but on a much bigger scale.
Every application/device can publish messages to a "message source" that can be subscribed to by anyone on the internet. Everyone can see the headers of the message and its tags; however, without the private key, they can't read the message's contents. In other words, it's pub/sub on internet scale; is distributed similar to how internet traffic is distributed. If I had to give it a name, I guess I would call it "Galactic Pub/Sub". :)
Yes, it is very similar. My hope is one day the internet backbone providers will agree on a protocol that will make Galactic Pub/Sub trivial to implement and use.