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Notes -
The PKI infrastructure for https was always half a scam, more a license to print money for whomever could convince the browsers to add their root key than anything. (Dear website owner who (had to) pay every year for your ssl certificate: check how long your browsers root certificates stay valid. Feel scammed yet?)
The fact that it is largely independent of DNS seems particularly silly. Certificates tied to hierarchical domain names would probably be an improvement. Everyone running a country code TLD could simply specify which certificates are valid for that particular TLD. Let DENIC (or German legislation) decide which CAs can validate .de certificates. Then it would seem reasonable to require devices with TLS-capable browsers sold in Germany to have these CAs and only these CAs enabled for .de. For bonus points, simply ship the TLS certificates over dnssec, so browsers only need to know the public keys of the root servers (while also adding non-Western root servers).
Similarly, Iran would have CAs for .ir. Yes, this means that they could MITM any .ir website, but I do not think that many dissident sites run under .ir in the first place. (The fix there would be a browser plugin which uploads any certificate chain it encounters. So any bad actor could be easily identified.)
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Also, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US can not be trusted as a steward of the internet any more than it can be trusted as a steward of free trade or the international rule-based order.
Trump's little war really does not seem to go well. In the beginning, his actions could be described as "grand but foolish", like assassinating the ayatollah or dropping a lot of bombs on the IRGC.
Now, he has escalated to ... (check notes) ... threatening a trade war with China if it does not follow US sanctions?
And the next plan to stop Iran from blocking Hormuz is to use the US influence on the internet to make the Iranian Persian Gulf Strait Authority unable to have a website which is loaded by default browsers? Surely that will be enough to get an unconditional surrender.
And if Iran does not bow to this, one could apply further pressure by evicting the Iranian delegation to the United Nations, I am sure that this would be devastating to them and well worth any transient reputational damage to the US as the host of the UN.
Certificates are free nowadays from any issuer worth your trust. I get the backlash against forcing HTTPS everywhere, but it is a genuine improvement over "walk into a coffee shop and pwn people's bank accounts/social media/email with them have no recourse or knowledge"
The benefit of the CA model is that it can assume that nation-states are, they themselves, a threat, and moreso than the browser developers. Sure you might not trust the preloaded list of certs, but you can always change that if you want (or ship your own browser with your own preloaded certs)
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