[mmalone]

Yea you’re correct. They were forcing people to add a CA. So this was not a great example.

I wouldn’t say the centralization of Web PKI is by design so much as it is (was?) by necessity. There’s a crypto conjecture called Zooko’s Triangle that says there are three desirable properties for a naming system: human-meaningful, secure, and decentralized. Zooko’s conjecture is that you can only have two. Web PKI picks secure & human-meaningful. Simple PKI (like TOFU) picks secure & decentralized (the names aren’t actually human-meaningful since you’re really trusting a public key which is a big random number, not a domain name). DNS picks human-meaningful and decentralized.

More recently, Aaron Schwartz realized you can “square the triangle” using blockchain. So it appears to be technically possible to have all three now, but there are other hurdles. In any case, simple public keys aren’t a silver bullet. Just a different set of compromises.