I missed that article; thanks for the pointer. They mentioned several of the examples I had in mind as I was writing about this. In the future I'll just link

I missed that article; thanks for the pointer. They mentioned several of the examples I had in mind as I was writing about this. In the future I'll just link to that. As for how many CAs there are, it's certainly true that there are zero barriers to entry. All you need is some open source software and a couple of shell scripts. But in order to be an effective CA, you need all the major browser and OS vendors (at a minimum) to ship your root certificate in a trusted-by-default configuration. Otherwise almost no one is going to have their certificates issued by you. Looking at the list of CAs trusted by Firefox and Apple, to name but two, there aren't really that many. A couple dozen, of which many are governmental entities that don't serve the general public. I'm sure if I looked at Microsoft's and Red Hat's and Google's I would find the intersection dwindling to the same old handful we've been stuck with for years. If it were really that simple to be an effective CA, there would be thousands of them, including many that might not even charge a fee as long as you're a member of a particular club, or that would be explicit about providing an authentication-only service. But there aren't, and that takes us back to the same problem.