[justsomehnguy]

You always have an option to run an internal PKI, without paying anyone.

The public PKI is built on the public DNS system. If you want a cert to be trusted by default and don't want to bother with your own internal PKI then you need to leverage the existing public infrastructure, which doesn't give it away as a free beer but sells it.

[lxgr]

Have you tried that with various devices these days? It's getting increasingly difficult to convince various mobile OSes to accept internal root CAs (largely for good reasons, but that's a different discussion).

> you need to leverage the existing public infrastructure, which doesn't give it away as a free beer but sells it.

No, it's the opposite these days. The existing PKI these days is free (Letsencrypt and others), but getting a public domain that any browser-acceptable CA will issue certificates for isn't. Your domain registration/renewal fees don't pay for that PKI.

I think it's urgently needed for browser vendors, the IETF etc. to get together and figure out a solution for accessing "mymediocreiotdevice.home" without a barrage of "zomg no HTTPS!!", "zomg self-signed cert!" etc. warnings, as these will only desensitize users further to actual problems on publicly-accessible sites.

[justsomehnguy]

>No, it's the opposite these days

This is what I said in the first place - public DNS is not free. The costs to get in range but the minimal isn't that much ($5/year to be precise), so the question is between any amount at and no at all.