Making identities persistent?

[Stefan Görling]

Hi everybody,

I'm trying to get a grip around your great work and have one issue that 
I'm not quite clear on, relevant to the discussion of using 
user at example.com-style identifiers, but also in a more general context. 
Please let me know if I've simply missunderstood my own question.

http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0-09.html#anchor48 says:
"OpenID is decentralized. No central authority must approve or register 
Relying Parties or Identity Providers. An End User can freely choose 
which Identity Provider to use. They can preserve their Identifier if 
they switch Identity Providers."

Let us consider the case that I'm an AOL.com customer, and they act as 
an IdP providing we with an identifier. I use this identifier for 3 
years for identity management on most of the services I use, due to the 
huge success of the standard... However, I'm starting to get fed up with 
AOL and terminates my agreement with them. Is there any procedure for me 
to switch to another IdP? How is this done?

Best Regards,

Stefan Görling