It is a digital certificate standard. Browser certificates is only a tiny part of it, that wasn't why it was made. Having a standard for digital certificates is a good thing, it makes it easy to switch document signer provider etc since they all are forced to implement the same interface.
I’ve read enough mozilla.dev.security.policy threads along the lines of “but we’re a qualified eIDAS CA (erm, TSP)! — but your audits, key management, and issuance controls are all crap! — but eIDAS!” that I feel that it might, in fact, be partly an attempt by CAs to ensure that they can’t be kicked out of browsers at the browsers’ discretion, or even have to obey CA/BF decisions. It certainly appeared that the fuss around QWACs got much louder as the EV UI downgrade progressed.
Maybe it wasn’t the original intention, but right now, even ignoring the surveillance angle, I feel that it would be a major downgrade to the post-Symantec state of the Web PKI. In particular, the process for getting a CA disqualified or inconvenienced in any other way seems to be so onerous as to be basically intractable, especially if you, the relying party, are not in the EU. As far as I can tell (but here I can be wrong), as a relying party you don’t even have standing to do anything about it—it’s considered to be solely the business of your country’s government, and if the government body doesn’t care (see: Facebook and the Irish DPA), tough, guess you’re a single-issue voter now.
>In the meantime, any digital signature done in EU must be done with a certificate issued only by the "select" CA to be considered "valid".
article 25 of EIDAS 1. An electronic signature shall not be denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings solely on the grounds that it is in an electronic form or that it does not meet the requirements for qualified electronic signatures.
The ETSI checker you have linked doesn't have anything to do with CA API interoperability and "switch document signer provider".
That's just a basic tool which validates if a signature is PADES/ETSI compliant or not.
The real value in eIDAS would be "unlocked" if they would release a proper API specification with which a digital signatures application would integrate with any EIDAS CA to emit/sign certificates. And then enforce that any eIDAS compliant CA would implement this API.
In practice that means any company/digital signatures product could do a integration with this API once and then be able to use ANY certification authority they want/need/offer best prices for certificates.
Without this API, eIDAS is just a marketing moniker because the power belongs to the selected Certification Authorities. They set the prices, they choose WHOM can integrate with them to isse certificates and there is NO interoperability between them. This doesnt allow for a open market and makes the top players control everything while shouting "standards" and "eIDAS".....
Why is that website using a domainhack (with a non-EU ccTLD) rather than a proper .eu domain? Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that these people should have anything to do with security standards.