[throw_a_grenade]

The point about antitrust lawsuits I concur, but LE is not the only free-as-in-beer ACME. For one, there's ZeroSSL, then Actalis, SSL.com. For some time BuyPass offered free certs, but it does no longer. Last but not least Google itself has Public CA that offers certs over ACME, a fact that I think would be a huge fulcrum for antitrust suit. I would also expect that all other CAs would deploy ACME endpoints to attract at least some part of the cake (note they're in business of being vultures already). So the message will be „go find another CA, here are three examples, sorted randomly like the European first boot UX, just change the URI in certbot config".

[notepad0x90]

Perhaps this shouldn't be left to the CA/B board, it has critical economic impact on many countries, it should be regulated by them?

Either way, I think LE has enough power to at least push-back and see where things fall. continuing to support users can't hurt them, until they truly have no other choice.

[throw_a_grenade]

> [...] it has critical economic impact on many countries, it should be regulated by them?

This was exactly the point of recent (2024) eIDAS update, which introduced EU Trusted Lists. The original draft was that the browsers were mandated to accept X.509 certs from CAs („TSP”s) accredited in EU by national bodies. Browsers were supposed not to be free to just eject CAs from their root programs for any reason or no reason at all, but in case of infractions they were supposed to report to CAB or NAB that would make the final decision.

Browesers responded by lobbying, because the proposal also contained some questionable stuff like mandatory EV UI, which the browsers rightfully deprecated, and also it wasn't clear if they can use OneCRL and similar alternative revocation schemes for mitigations of ongoing attacks. The language was diluted.