<i>Repressive governments monitoring and altering unencrypted communications in very sophisticated ways is a reality today</i><p>They could easily alter encrypted communications to effectively censor too, thanks to the all-or-nothing nature of encryption with authentication. Because by design, the certificate is presented in cleartext, it would be pretty easy to blacklist CAs and then cut off the connection if one of those is detected. Alternatively, whitelist CA(s) [1]. Analysing plaintext takes more computational resources, especially if things like steganography are used.<p>[1] Related article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10663843" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10663843</a>