> A very welcome move because for years Cloudflare has freeloaded certs from Let's Encrypt without sponsoring Let's Encrypt finacially.

It's not freeloading to accept a gift freely given. I'm sure the people who do fund LE are happy to see the world's largest TLS terminator using LE certs to secure the web - that is and was the whole point of LE in the first place. It's being used as intended.

What you are proposing sounds like DANE with TLSA and DNSSec. Great idea but most CC TLDs are still using 1024 RSA ZSKs. Right now PQ DNSSEC is very uncertain. PQ DNSSEC will likely take about 5 more years or so to standardise. And thats too late for companies like Google and Cloudlfare which want to go PQ Crypto by 2029.

It is, but that‘s why I trust Honest Achmed (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959). He is a man of integrity and will not be bought!

Not a huge difference between buying the root cert itself and getting a cross-sign. LE started out with cross-signs from Identrust.

"On October 19, 2015, the intermediate certificates became cross-signed by IdenTrust, causing all certificates issued by Let's Encrypt to be trusted by all major browsers."

There are a whole host of controls in place to mitigate this risk. Plus such an acquisition wouldn't be easy to keep secret, so as soon as an untrusted actor acquired control over a root, the CAB would likely immediately distrust the cert.

https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirem...

Google (GTS) has done the same. GTS controls GlobalSign R4. GlobalSign R4 was a root cert which was created by GlobalSign and later sold to Google.

If a bad actor starts buying up CA's, then very quickly that CA would be distrusted by Root Cert Store Operators. No different than what happened with DigiNotr and Entrust.

Are you as honest as Honest Achmed? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959)

Why does every criticism of CloudFlare ignore the fact that they mitigate the largest DDoSes in the world in an age where DDoS-for-hire cost only a few dollars per minute? Nobody could do that on the budget of a 1996 local ISP with one or 2 part-time IT techs.

CloudFlare was launched as a stupid-simple CDN, but DDoS mitigation and bot reduction are actually valuable features for many websites. Sure, CF isn't the only business in this space, but most of their rivals are large enough to be in the S&P500 / Russell 2000, so it's not like garage startups are competing for this business.

"Was meant to be"

This isn't a law of physics. This was a starry-eyed hope by techno-utopians and academics when the internet was still 100% funded by Uncle Sam. When the internet moved out of its parents' basement, it had to grow up and get a job to pay the bills. Some people are fine with a SquareSpace webpage instead of running their own custom Apache httpd website on bare metal in a colo like it's 2005. The cost of maintenance and cognitive load is a cost we shouldn't ignore.

It turns out that economies of scale exist. The Internet doesn't need 10,000 small CDNs and they would all be inefficient and expensive if that was the distribution. Instead, there are a few large ones that can afford to colo in many geographically dispersed data centers and who negotiated bandwidth peering contracts for advantageous pricing.

You could also make the alternative argument: the internet as a truly decentralized network as imagined by nerds was never going to actually work due to its (now obvious) impact on the political economy of the world and its actors, and because fundamentally centralized economies of scale are how humans tend to organize society. So why are internet nerds on forums so narrow minded that they don't read understand this, because they don't read books? But both of these "arguments" are pointless posts designed to get head-pats, because everyone has made up their mind. Buy your DV certs from another ACME provider.

Capitalism, starting the moment TLD registrars first bid for the monopoly to charge rent. And continuing today, where I think only Cloudflare offer below or at cost domain registration, charging nothing themselves and just passing on the other mandatory fees to the rent seekers. It has had centralization at its heart since the beginning, when someone had to allocate IP addresses and everyone else had to agree (or we would have internets and not The Internet), which enabled this. I wonder if it would have turned out differently if, instead of central IP address allocation, clients had generated a UUID and it was accepted on The Internet unless consensus agreed it wasn't unique? But I don't think we knew how to do that then and technical limitations. Heck, crypto export laws would have killed it and required a central authority to prove that a UUID was you and not an imposter.

Because some people want power, and abuse it.

Evolution & the illusion of the separate self.