Comment by t1234s
14 hours ago
Lets hope they stay independent and never get acquired by Google or any other large tech company. You can imagine a web where SSL issuance is used as a tool to censor websites. I think most browsers have been made to make standard http sites look malicious to normal users.
They're a nonprofit - so they can't be acquired like a typical for-profit company. They could in theory sell some assets but it'd be very convoluted if they were the core assets -- per US tax law, nonprofit assets must remain in the nonprofit world, so there's no risk of any tech company ruining them.
Look at OpenAI - where there’s a will (and an army of lawyers), there’s a way. That said, I don’t think any of the big tech orgs would be interested in acquiring them. Google and Amazon even already have their own public CAs that are in the major trust stores.
I heard similar things about another American nonprofit and now I'm not so sure about it. When money and will comes along, loopholes come as well.
So, I wouldn't be so sure, unfortunately.
If Google wants to censor your website, they have a variety of other, more effective methods, like by adding it to their safe browsing blacklist, which is also used in many Firefox installs.
Or even more apples to apples, they could ignore your cert in Chrome
As someone else mentioned, it's a non-profit, so I guess it's not technically possible to get acquired.
But I personally believe that the people behind LetsEncrypt genuinely care about the mission and will never sell out for their personal benefit.
If there was a list of organizations that bring the most impactful things to tech per each dollar received in donations and per each employee, ISRG will be up there at the top.