How do you imagine that would work for something like this?

Suppose you live in South America, register a domain from a registry in Canada and then have users accessing it from Ukraine. Are we going to give every local government a global root certificate? Have a single one in California or Texas that every other country is somehow forced to use? Or make it so people in Europe can't access sites in Asia and vice versa?

The existing system is more than the usual amount of messed up but that seems like one of the things that could actually make it worse.

You don't need a "root certificate".

Just publish a public key in your DNS TXT records. ACME is just that anyways but with extra (pointless) steps.

The whole SSL certificate grift is just a way to extort money out of nothing.

Ok, but now you need to trust DNSSEC.

The point GP was making is that DNS-record based ACME mechanism for verification of ownership implies trust in the domain name owner (or really, anyone who can edit records in the domain zone), making the issuance of a certificate actually superfluous.

DNSSEC is probably not even used, though I never checked.

Eg. as a domain owner, you will put a cryptographic hash into your DNS zone so a CA can validate you have control over it, and then issue a different cryptographic hash derived from their private key, and browser will use their public key to validate this cryptographic hash (TLS cert) is valid.

So we could simply push public key into a DNS zone, and browsers could use it to decrypt the traffic encrypted by the private key from the server hosted under that DNS name: no CAs needed, similar to SSH except the DNS-ownership-implied-trust component.

"Extended validation" certificates involved a lot more (in theory, checking true ownership, business address, physical presence, etc), but nobody really cares about these, and with the push to automated renewal and 45-day expiration dates by 2028, it's going to make even less sense.

Edit: I realize now that you may be referring to the fact that MITM DNS server can inject a different public key in there and thus DNSSEC is required — you are absolutely right, and this is a good and important point.

... but then, as they point out, you have to trust DNSSEC, and that's pretty fraught --- probably more fraught than trusting a CA.

It's all an elaborate scheme by the ISRG: compete all the commercial CAs out of existence, and then charge A MILLION DOLLARS for a certificate renewal. I've seen this movie before.

same way every public utility works. It's great until a capitalist buys your government and forces you to sell it back to them while they rent seek.