That said, I'd assume governments have access to root certificates, anyway, but they're only broken out for big investigations or secret dragnet stuff we'll find out about in five decades, if ever.
> but they're only broken out for big investigations or secret dragnet stuff we'll find out about in five decades, if ever.
Certificate Transparency, where required, makes certificates unusable if they're not published... But that might not be enough information.
If the user doesn't click through the certificate error, the user will only know it's blocked (or the server is misconfigured), they won't get information on why it's blocked; perhaps details of the certificate might help narrow down the cause of the block or the agency implementing it.
If the user loads the https page and sees "Access to this page is disabled The law prohibits participation in games of chance organized by unauthorized persons through means of electronic communication." as suggested earlier in this thread, and the user did not click through a certificate error, then the MITM must have obtained an acceptable certificate somehow or broken TLS. Since Sep 2024, multi-perspective issuance corroboration has been required by the CA/Browser Forum [1] and it was a best practice for many years, DNS takeover in a single country should be not sufficient to establish domain control for certificate issuance.
[1] https://cabforum.org/2024/08/05/ballot-sc067v3-require-domai...
Ah right, obviously the browser would still try to connect via TLS to the new IP. Not sure why I missed that.
If not, then maybe your browser vendor has been pressured to add some root certificate controlled by the Serbian police, which it approves to issue certificates to impersonate dodgy-casino.games.