> No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. > Anyone can buy and transfer certificates.

> No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. > Anyone can buy and transfer certificates. The registrar has a business relationship with the domain because the domain was purchased. The domain's owner uses DNS to point to an IP address. The client connects to that IP address and verifies that the IP address knows about the domain. "I paid for you to see example.com at 1.2.3.4" and "1.2.3.4 is responding to the name of example.com" completes that relationship. With Letsencrypt, anyone can get certificates for free. And you certainly can transfer your private key and certificate information to a third party. That won't stop you from being liable for any malware served by them because you are the one who owns the domain. Unless you transfer the domain too. Then it's all on them. The third party. Hope you transferred the IP address payment too. > Besides there are actual business contracts in place so there's no need for such tenuous connections over domain names in the first place. Business contracts don't mean shit to me because I can't inspect them. I can inspect DNS, however. > As for your disagreement, what's your basis for claiming that publishers can build, operate, and scale their own adtech infrastructure and salesforce? Publishers can just as easily create advertisements and host them on their own website the same way they host any other static content. Scaling advertisements is just as easy (or hard) as scaling any other web services. Once upon a time businesses actually employed people for their sales departments instead of offloading it to a third party.