Like the TSA at the airport.
Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Free, for now.
It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.
Nah, anyone can become a certificate authority.
The difference is that the current trusted certificate authorities are autonatically trusted by browsers and operating systems.
But you could run your own CA, issue certs for yourself and your friends, and get them to import your CA public key to their trusted CA store.
Then it would work just like getting a cert from letsencrypt. The only difference is that letsencrypt is already included the CA store of OSs and browsers, so people dont have to do all the manual stuff