> And in the end I believe that courts need to be educated on how the Internet works
This is not an education issue. Rights holders want to use every tool in the box to add friction and barriers to piracy, courts offer pushback only when that would result in a marked loss in utility for ordinary users. They do not care about the sanctity of DNS or whatever engineer-brained ideals are being violated.
The sanctity of TLS certificates is the backbone of internet banking and basic privacy for everyday users. It's surprising that you or the courts would see this as a problem that only affects engineers, when it weakens the guarantees that everyday people and businesses rely on to conduct their business safely.
The trust we have in the CAs who are embedded in our root stores is very important - yes.
Thankfully, in this case the issue at hand is entirely unrelated to TLS, rogue CAs etc. Or even DNS record manipulation (for now)...
Cloudflare put a 'You're blocked' page, on the web server that Cloudflare are already running for their customer. The customer being the website that Cloudflare is being ordered to block (for users in certain countries).
Cloudflare's actions seem to me to be similar to sending out letters saying "this client has been banned from using our services" using that client's own letterhead. Are they not misrepresenting the communication as though it's from the client, when really it's from Cloudflare? Sure, it's benign, but it's an unnecessary muddying of the waters.
This is not an education issue. Rights holders want to use every tool in the box to add friction and barriers to piracy, courts offer pushback only when that would result in a marked loss in utility for ordinary users. They do not care about the sanctity of DNS or whatever engineer-brained ideals are being violated.