[lmm]

Can you though? The loose consensus model means there's little accountability and no practical way to opt out of listening to a particular entity that you don't trust. There are tales of essentially "someone with an @google.com email" being able to tell a CA to stop issuing certificates to particular undesirables, and the CA complying.

[Vinnl]

You can, to a limited extent. If e.g. Google were to start censoring news.ycombinator.com by blocklisting its CAs, I could switch browsers to view it anyway. (Or vice versa, if there's a big security issue and one browser (who still trusts the relevant CAs) was vulnerable and another one was not, I might then consider switching browsers.)

[lmm]

> If e.g. Google were to start censoring news.ycombinator.com by blocklisting its CAs, I could switch browsers to view it anyway.

You could if it got to that point, but the CA would almost certainly "voluntarily" stop issuing certificates to news.ycombinator.com rather than face the risk of being blocklisted, and there's no way for you to opt out of that.

[Vinnl]

Hmm yeah that's a good point, not much you can do about that as a user.