From an engineering perspective https makes all the sense in the world, but the *pain-point I think they're getting at is that http/s is basically user-facing a

From an engineering perspective https makes all the sense in the world, but the *pain-point I think they're getting at is that http/s is basically user-facing as well, and it is now both more difficult to set up and maintain, and less semantic, for hundreds of millions of people. Over the past decade I've helped maybe 100 small businesses set up internet presence, and I promise you none of them understand https or set it up correctly at first, despite often paying for it from hosting providers like Godaddy. This isn't the fault of the engineers behind implementing it; it was necessary of course. But if the web were a perfect authoritarian regime we could have just saved us all the headache and dropped http altogether, thus avoiding this bureaucratic protocol redirecting mess. I would be very interested to read about why that was not done actually. (I'm sure there were reasons)