>    I share your skepticism, but i'm still trying to salvage something
    useful -- for the purpose of defending against CA malfeasance -- from
    the mechanisms we have available.

For that, you mainly want certificate transparency, no?

>   If certificate validation is the process of confirming what a CA says,
    then a CA that has said "this certificate should not be considered valid
    unless you also have a reasonable proof of freshness" is pretty
    unequivocal.

While I like this sentiment, I think there are a couple of arguments against 
it. First, there's the ever-present escape hatch of out of band, or local 
policy. Second, there is the history of poor behavior by some CA's, which leads 
to the primary user agent (browsers, or perhaps TLS runtimes) not being able to 
just completely trust them. Perhaps that historic era has passed, and it is 
time for user agents to end their probation of CA's? Not for me to say.

> But once you're ignoring what the CA actually wrote
    and signed in the certificate, you're on your own.

It's not that I'm on my own, but that the user agent is deciding.  Now, I grant 
that the vast majority of users are not capable of making a decision, let alone 
an informed one, but I think it might be useful for us to keep phrasing things 
in terms of user agent.

    > The choice about whether to require stapling or not _is_ a policy
    > decision relevant not only to server operators, but also relying
    > parties, and can be easily abused by CAs if given that lever.

    What kind of abuse are you anticipating here?  can you spell it out in
    more detail?

+1  I suppose they could DoS their own customers, or upcharge them or something.

And +1 to getting answers to the rest of DKG's questions.  In theory, this note 
shouldn't need any reply :)

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