A real issue with the cert business is that phishers have really screwed up the economics of it. They are desperate to get SSL certs for domains that are almost

A real issue with the cert business is that phishers have really screwed up the economics of it. They are desperate to get SSL certs for domains that are almost that of legitimate companies and charities as much of the general internet populace has absorbed that "the green lock" means "safe". This has kicked off two responses by CA's and Browser makers. Certificate issuers putting in place a mix of automated and manual approval mechanism for what used to be "automatic" certs (from my own experience [1] - around 10% of certificate requests fall into this category). Browser makers have started to de-value the UI/UX of the "cheap and easy" certs that Tim is advocating be issued. Case in point Tim's URL is just gray (no green at all) in FF, but you can see a definite trend across the board in making the SSL presence of non EV certs less prominent [2] Taken together, I think this makes it really tough for Google to step in with a 'cheap' solution. 1 - I run https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl 2 - https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-ssl-icons-and-design.html https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-s...