I'm a little baffled by the suggestions of a whole new protocol to fix this: it seems to me like there's a really easy solution.
Just say no to people who want to buy links, or votes, or ask you to take down links. Throw those e-mails in your spam folder.
I say this not as a Googler but as someone who struggled with boundary issues as a young adult, where people would ask me unreasonable things and I would comply or I would ask them unreasonable things and burden them. It is not your responsibility to feed someone else's family, unless, of course, you want to. It is not your responsibility to undo the link penalties that some spammer racked up with black-hat SEO, unless they're damaging your own site's reputation and you want to do something about it. It is not your responsibility to fix the web, unless, of course, you have a concrete improvement that you can convince people to try.
It is the SEO's job to find ways to add value without pissing people off. It is Google's job to keep their product useful enough in the face of people that want to abuse it that you keep using it. It's your job to make decisions that advance your interest without trampling on the interests of others.
BTW, Google's tried several attempts at verified authorship protocols, one of which I worked on:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/11/17/fat-pings-what-are-they-why...
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index...
https://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
They usually fail for lack of adoption. It's very difficult to get people to buy into a system that makes them do extra work for the general health of the ecosystem.
Also FWIW, if I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operates and having a huge leg up on the competition. Why? Because there are several hundred people inside Google changing the algorithm, and just me on the outside trying to adapt to the changes. I'm far better off aligning my incentives with Google, so that all the work they do benefits me. I'd do this by providing a compelling enough experience for users that they keep coming back and talk about the product on their own accord, not by trying to force them to talk about it. Then all of Google's evals, metrics, etc. would say that my site should be on top, and so they'll tweak the algorithm to adapt to me instead of me tweaking my site to adapt to the algorithm.