Dave Winer opposes Google’s plan to effectively deprecate HTTP by discriminating against non-HTTPS websites in Chrome:
I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.
The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.
Mozilla has indicated that they are doing the same. But Eric Mill wrote a piece a couple of years ago about this very topic, and he appreciates the deprecation of HTTP:
I understand the fear of raising the barriers to entry. As a child, I too fell in love with an internet made by everyone, and have spent my career, my volunteer work, and my hobbies trying to share what that love has taught me. I want children everywhere in the world to grow up feeling like the internet that permeates their lives is also in their service — a lego set in real life that you can buy with a week’s allowance.
Yet as an adult, I also understand that power for ordinary people is hard to come by and hard to keep. The path of least resistance for human society is for money to buy more money, and might to demand more might. Democracy is designed not so much to expand freedom as it is to give people tools to desperately hold onto the freedom they have.
Put another way: power has a way of flowing away from the varied, strange, beautiful little leaf nodes on the outer edges and into the unaccountable, unimaginative, ever-hungry center.
Mill actually uses the enforcement of HTTPS by browser vendors as a knock against big companies like Verizon and Comcast that inject ads into HTTP-served websites, and spy agencies like the NSA and the GCHQ:
What animates me is knowing that we can actually change this dynamic by making strong encryption ubiquitous. We can force online surveillance to be as narrowly targeted and inconvenient as law enforcement was always meant to be. We can force ISPs to be the neutral commodity pipes they were always meant to be. On the web, that means HTTPS.
As Mill points out in his article, there are great reasons to add an HTTPS certificate to a website that has no interactive elements beyond links. It makes sense to me to generally prefer HTTPS going forward, but I have concerns about two browser vendors working to effectively eliminate the non-HTTPS web; or, at least, to put barriers between it and users.
I like the way Firefox attempts to educate users directly adjacent to insecure password fields; I also don’t mind the way Chrome handles notifications of HTTP-only webpages today. But the changes coming in July that will mark all HTTP webpages as “not secure”, and that will make a large — if hardly-trafficked — part of the web feel like it’s diseased. And what will Google do in the future, I wonder? If they’re going to progressively increase their warnings on HTTP webpages, what’s next?
I also agree with Winer on another key point: enforcing a pseudo-mandatory policy on HTTPS makes it that much harder for someone new to this stuff to even begin to understand it. As Frank Chimero recently wrote, building stuff for the web has become vastly more complicated since even five years ago. I’m happy to keep learning new skills and growing my understanding of what the web can do, but I don’t know where to begin on this modern web. I don’t intend to hold myself up as a barometer of the complexities of modern web programming or anything — I just don’t know what’s going on any more. I’ve been doing this stuff for nearly twenty years. I don’t know how someone who is eight years old could start digging into React, or Node.js, or any of the other modern JavaScript-based ways of writing <h1>hello world</h1>.
I’m sure the kids will figure it out — they always do. However, I worry that introducing more requirements, even something as simple as HTTPS, can be discouraging. That’s the last thing HTTP/HTML web should be: discouraging. It is one of the greatest enablers of communication in human history. Let’s not allow its future to be dictated by browser vendors.
Or, in Mill’s language: let’s make sure we encourage building more leaf nodes by making their creation easier and more fun, instead of allowing a much stronger centre to form.