Meanwhile, in the real world:
- We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. The scare tactics used to sell VPNs in YouTube ads used to all be true, and no longer are, due to this.
- We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain.
- We went from a CA ecosystem where only commercial alternatives exist to one where the main CA is a nonprofit run by a foundation consisting mostly of strong proponents of Internet freedom.
- Even if you count ZeroSSL and Let's Encrypt as US-controlled, there is at least one free non-US alternative using the same protocol, i.e. suitable as a drop-in replacement (https://www.actalis.com/subscription).
- Plenty of other paid but affordable alternatives exist from countless countries, and the ecosystem seems to be getting better, not worse.
- While many other paths have been used to attempt to censor web sites, I haven't seen the certificate system used for this frequently (I'm sure there are individual court orders somewhere).
- If the US wanted to put its full weight behind getting a site off the Internet, it would have other levers that would be equally or more effective.
- Most Internet freedom advocates recognize that the migration to HTTPS was a really, really good thing.