HTTPS can't verify that either, to be quite honest. It can ensure modest protection against a specific class of MITM attacks. If the traffic goes through a CDN like cloudflares it's decrypted, inspected, possibly manipulated and re-encrypted mid-flight. A well funded actor can also lean on the website owner, or just hack them.
Dysfunctional markets is a legal problem, not a technical one. Concealing the consequences of market dysfunction with technological band-aids only serves to preserve the status quo.
Firstly it punishes those in the worst situations. Those in countries with abusive political systems, those who have no legal representation, etc.
I don't even believe the idea is right in practice "serves to preserve the status quo" is just wrong in this case. HTTPS completely breaks most terrible things ISPs can do. It completely dismantles the system.
> Firstly it punishes those in the worst situations. Those in countries with abusive political systems, those who have no legal representation, etc.
HTTPS offers virtually no defense against a state actor.
> I don't even believe the idea is right in practice "serves to preserve the status quo" is just wrong in this case. HTTPS completely breaks most terrible things ISPs can do. It completely dismantles the system.
HTTPS doesn't dismantle the system at all. You're still stuck with no other option for an ISP, which means you are not going to get favorable terms. And even with HTTPS, you need to look up the IP for the servers you're going to visit, and ISPs can snoop on your DNS traffic and sell information about how you, the IP (or the person), regularly looks up the IP for abortionpills.example.com (or connects to the IP associated with the server).
It's just one data point though. The real juice comes when you have a hundred thousand traffic logs to compare, then you can start inferring similarities even from vague and incomplete data points.
