Is anyone wonders why it's a problem it's under US juristriction:
Look up the US Cloud Act. It's everything the media told you China was, but in the hands of an orange dictator.
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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They have strong canaries in place, namely certificate transparency. They wisely designed themselves in a way to prevent themselves from tampering.
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There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let's Encrypt is a non-profit.
- ZeroSSL (Austria)
- Actalis (Italy)
commercial
free certificates
How do they make money?
Usually they make money with extended certificates where they not only offer a certificate for example.com but also certify that it belongs to Example Ltd.
Those extended certificates used to show the company name next to address bars, but I don't think browsers do that anymore.
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Simi-related fun fact.
The biggest contributor to TOR is the CIA. They funded it's creation and are primarily responsible for maintaining it to this day.
The CIA maintains TOR as a way for spies to pass information over the internet. They make it public because if only spies used TOR it would be trivial to catch them. So it's in their interest that it be public and secure. It's open source and security experts agree you can trust it.
The CIA, not navy intelligence?
The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.
So since this, according yo you, is a fact, I do suppose you have evidence to this claim? And I'm talking evidence that can be corroborated, not a Facebook post or something from a conspiracy sub, and not "oh man, everybody knows this!" because everybody doesn't know this.
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Let's encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
That the U.S. government can arbitrarily take down websites by revoking certificates issued by let's encrypt? How obvious can it be? I wondered the same thing as OP months ago. We need european alternatives. I think there are some, have some bookmarked somewhere.
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I don't think anyone is gonna solve that problem until it's actually a problem.
I don't think anyone's going to solve the problem in general, to be honest.
Like, Let's Encrypts goal is super novel, but also expensive as shit to actually run, and requires a lot of coordination because it needs to be a trust authority. If this ever happened, it would probably be at the backing of some government structure, because I don't see many people wanting to jump at that as an expense.
What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?
If it's the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn't really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).
Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.
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This is why I never even started using Letsencrypt; looking at the fine print, you actually enter into some kind of contract ~~with some US entity~~ under US law, which I don't want even if it's the coolest of all FOSS foundations.
Here's a site that has some info:
https://www.eurotoolkit.eu/categories/certificate-authority-ca
I have used certum.pl for years and it looks like I might go back to them soon because my VPS provider doesn't offer bundled certs anymore.
I used to pay €40/year iirc.
I suspect it's gotten more expensive though.
edit:
oh looks like ZeroSSL are doing it letsencrypt-style with Acme protocol for €0.
edit2:
No, not more expensive. Some of the providers in the above link are labyrinthine and I couldn't even find a Pricing section - usually a sign that it's too expensive at least for a normal consumer - but others offer yearly certs for as little as €30 (taxes not included).
edit3:
Yeah some people are going to have a hard time accepting that a contract with a for-profit company under EU jurisdiction might be preferable to a contract with a non-profit under US jurisdiction.
I've been using ZeroSSL for over 5 years and can attest that they are friendly in that I have literally never seen or heard from them.
I've set up and cancelled multiple domains in this time, and have had one domain running for the entirety of my time with ZeroSSL.
I don't think you (OP) are gonna find much better than a for-profit business with a good track record if you're unwilling to use Letsencrypt.
This is good to know.
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ZeroSSL costs 180 per year for unlimited 90 day certs. I get the independence from US-based services, but I don't want to drop that kind of money on my toy domains.
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@Sibbo I do not see any problem with Letsencrypt. Any CA which is widely trusted has to follow the same rules. This rules are set up by the CA Browser Forum. Which metadata does LE collect? My server's IP address, domain and subdomain, mail address. These are logged in the CT logs. Every CA has to log all certificates in a public CT log. Regardless which CA I choose, these data are public. There are not any critical data or metadata that LE can collect.
Letsencrypt can be directly forced to revoke certificates by the US. Organisations outside of the US are less vulnerable against that.
And ICAAN can hand your domain over to US law enforcement regardless of the TLD and your register.
Is that also part of your decision tree?
Is this accurate? Like, I know what you're meaning, but I'm pretty sure it's not ICANN doing it, and more so your domain registrar handing it over to the US government.
I think the most control that ICANN has over it is they could theoretically, if they wanted to, delete an entire top level domain. Since they do control the DNS root, but that is the most that they control from what I understand.
I don't know if they have the ability to delete or transfer control over an individual domain on legal request. I think that's outside of what their actual system allows for.
ICANN can (theoretically) not force anyone to deregister your domain. If your stack is all outside the US, and everyone collectively decided to disobey the US, the Internet's decentralization would be true.
The hard part about building a decentralized network is finding out where to hide the centralization.
For the Internet, the centralization is hidden in the IP block and DNS Zone delegation. After this is done, that region is decentralized. A/I's problem was that the registry for .org is a subsidiary of IANA. With EU servers, EU DNS and a EU domain, EU clients cannot be prevented from connecting solely from the outside. The US would need a collaborator.
That is all well and good, but we have many instances of domains being pulled from people because of court ruling and your register is not going to defy a court ruling for your €17/year domain.
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First let's identify what parts of the world are free-er than the US (for a certificate).
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