In general a lot of the modern HTTPS approach "feels" broken. Looking at it purely from a usability perspective, HTTPS combines two things when it really should

In general a lot of the modern HTTPS approach "feels" broken. Looking at it purely from a usability perspective, HTTPS combines two things when it really should only be doing one of them: * Encryption is the first thing HTTPS does and the one I'd argue that actually matters the most. It prevents your ISP or other middle parties from snooping or modifying what packets end up being shown to the end user. This is something that fundamentally doesn't require a CA to work. A self signed certificate is just as secure as one issued by a certificate authority on the matter of encryption; you just run an openssl command and you have a certificate, no CA needed (although a CA could still be useful for ie. Trusting updated certificates in the same chain, there's little reason to demand this to be done through a third party from a security perspective.) * The second one is identification. Basically, the certificate is meant to give the idea that the site you're visiting is trusted and verified to belong to somebody. This is what CAs provided... except in practice, CA identification guarantees basically doesn't exist anymore. Finding the entity a certificate is issued to is hard to do in modern browsers, ever since a security researcher proved that it's relatively trivial to do a name collision attack, so browser developers (aka Chrome and Mozilla) hide it behind click through windows and don't show them anymore by default. Since browsers mandate HTTPS for as many APIs as they can get away with, everyone including garden variety scammers just gets an HTTPS certificate, which utterly defeats the entire purpose. CAs are essentially sitting in the middle and unless a third party suddenly demands you get an OV/EV certificate, the argument to not just use the CA that gives literally anyone who asks a certificate after the barest minimum effort to prove they own a domain is pretty questionable. Your bank might use an OV/EV certificate, but your average person seeing the bank website will not visually see any difference between that and a scam site. Both got perfectly legitimate certificates; one just got them from LetsEncrypt instead, where they had to give no details on the certificate. Only nerds look at the difference when visiting sites, and more people than nerds use banks. Since identification is utterly dead, the entire CA structure feels like it gives little security to a modern browser as opposed to just going with a TOFU scheme like we do for SSH. Functionally, a CA ran by a sysadmin has the exact same guarantee as a CA ran by LetsEncrypt on the open internet for encryption purposes, except LE gets to be in browser and OS root programs. They might as well have the same security standards once you bring in CAA records. Final note: there's something backwards about how a plain HTTP connection just gets a small label in the browser to complain about it, while a HTTPS certificate that's a single minute out of date will lead to giant full screen red pages that you have to click through. For consistency, the HTTP page should be getting the same scare pages from an encryption perspective, but they don't.