I hadn't read it that way and that's a really good point. If you have too many trusted-third parties in a trust model like this, you run into difficulties with

I hadn't read it that way and that's a really good point. If you have too many trusted-third parties in a trust model like this, you run into difficulties with enforcement due to scaling problems, but what we're seeing is the converse of that. Symantec went out and bought up other CAs (Verisign is the only one I can remember for some reason) and they've become so large that them losing CA status would be prohibitively damaging to the internet-at-large. This affects not only enforcement (we don't want to move on a bad actor because the consequences of enforcement would be more severe than the consequences of a rule violation), it also negatively affects the trust model -- now if I'm a bad actor, Symantec is my only target -- even though I could attack the others and yield some of the same benefits of attacking Symantec, if I breach Symantec, the rewards are larger by several orders of magnitude depending on what they store and how they store it. To digress a little ... today ... I'm not all that surprised that Symantec has reached sort-of monopoly status in this area. Not because Symantec is a well managed company (I'm making no statement for or against that despite my personal opinions), but just because so much of The Internet has turned out this way. If you would have told me in 1998 that for the very vast majority of US Internet users, there'd be one search engine, one e-commerce company, one (expensive) ISP, one e-mail provider, all of it would be secured by services provided by one company's CA and all of that wouldn't matter much because the typical Internet experience would basically be a web-enabled, bluer version of AOL[0], I'd have called you some unfriendly things, but that's where we are. It's a centralized system operating on decentralized technology. [0] Oh, and that the "one e-commerce company" was that bookstore web-site and would be responsible for hosting such a large part of the rest of the Internet that when they had a major failure and people had that handful of rare clicks off of FAOLBook, they'd have about a 50% chance that whatever their target was wouldn't load.