HTTPS as a ranking signal
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't something a search engine should be dictating. Turning enabling SSL into some arms race that panics small businesses into buying millions of new, pointless certificates just isn't very fair.<p>This kind of policy needs to be discussed openly in a suitable forum, e.g. the IETF, not handed down to us by a single company who think they have a right to dictate how the Internet works - and have provably done a horrible job of it in the past (websocket over SPDY, anyone? Yeah, I'm not even sure which version combination of SPDY and websocket I'm talking about either - pick one of the hundred)<p>There are strong arguments for not enabling privacy by default - not least since it prevents any kind of decentralization or caching of content. At a time when OpenSSL just suffered one of its worst bugs in history, forcing small sites to assume the risk of running code like this, which they inevitably will get wrong, <i>materially worsens security for all</i>, it doesn't improve it.