No offense taken we all have different knowledge and background. I have a general understanding of podman, but now I'm going to go play with it a bit at some point and get more familiar with it.

Docker is Apache 2.0 licensed. It is open source. Or at least all of the important parts. I'm not sure about docker desktop. It's partly that I just have a lot of experience with docker, and partly just that it's what is supported in most projects' documentation. The fact that a lot of the Linux foundation training uses docker is another reason I've got more experience with it.

As far as what you are talking about people have been trying for years. The Pirate Bay wanted to develop a new method of being entirely decentralized. Odysee is working on something like blockchain/torrents combined that is very interesting. We have I2P and TOR which have some of the features you mention. I'd love to see it happen where the big companies didn't control things.

There is progress though. https://letsencrypt.org/ is non-profit, and there are a variety of open source projects using this to automate TLS certificate signing.

Check out https://www.sigstore.dev/how-it-works and pay special attention to Fulcio and Rekor. It's not for web certs, but it's still a very interesting take on a certificate authority.

There's no technical reason what you are saying couldn't work. It just comes down to how do you trust it, and if you can't at all, it doesn't do much good anyway. That's the problem to be solved. You could compromise somewhere in the middle but then you have to work out what is acceptable. I suppose the level of trust could be configurable, with different nodes earning a different level of trust, and you could configure your accepted levels for DNS or CA. It's an interesting idea.