CAA DNS records aim to make that more difficult, actually, but otherwise AFAIK you're right. =)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_Certification_Authority_Au...

CAA is for telling competent CAs that you don't want to use their service, so as to avoid them being fooled by bad guys who pretend to be you. If you think their methods are dubious or just won't be effective due to how your names are managed, CAA lets you flag that they shouldn't issue for your names at all.

If a CA is incompetent or malevolent it would just ignore CAA records or not check them at all.

It would be a serious bug if a web browser for example went "Hey this site has a cert from Bob's CA but the CAA records for the domain say only Alice's CA is to issue" and rejected the certificate from Bob's CA. The CAA notice is about allowing new issuances right now but maybe last week when I got this certificate from Bob's CA I didn't set that CAA record so that was fine.

It would be valid (maybe not a brilliant idea, but valid) to set CAA to refuse all issuance, changing it only for a few minutes once a week while you do all your certificate changes.

Oh wow, and here I thought having clients check that record was the whole point, as a layer of defense against rogue CAs. Thank you so much, I hadn't realized. =)