No Stupid Questions

Not sure I get this one. You can still run a website with http. Now it might alarm the browser and users. But you can do it.

As for certificates being free but maybe not now. It's actually the other way round. As I recall when https was pretty new the main way was via verisign, and it was not cheap to get one.

The fact you could later get one for free for example via letsencrypt is what made it so everyone could run https (along with the changes that allow multiple certs on a single server with multiple domains).

If it became expensive to get certs again I'd bet a lot of hobbyist stuff would go back to http or self signed and browsers would need to tone down the warning. But, I cannot imagine that happening now. Having most sites encrypted is a good thing.

I'd consider my internet browsing unknowingly being snooped on or having content injected as a benefit and not a scam.

The latest post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedom and privacy advocacy group touches on HTTPS, and how HTTPS becoming the norm is an improvement on privacy compared to the past.

I understand the issue of big tech being the authority, but I also see the benefit of hiding my data from ISP and snooping. There are practical p2p ways to make this work or even a federated authenticator but we are probably stuck with https for a long while yet

No, it is not a scam or like the TSA. (... which is of much less clear benefit, but that's a different story.)

Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.

How do you figure? Dropping unsafe practices earlier would've been a great idea, it was just another item in the long list of "people suck at technology", that stuck around out of habit and sloppiness. HTTPS is not new, but for a long time it was much more acceptable to deal with plain unsafe solutions for many uses. Since setting up an HTTPS site for free got very, very easy, there just weren't many excuses left.

Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.

Sort of. By necessity, in a chain of trust, the buck has to stop somewhere, that's your root "authority". In some cases you just make your own on the logic that you trust yourself, or accept some other cert/authority as trusted, or tell the browser "yeah whatever, I know what I'm doing" if you know it's safe. The catch is that then, for any number of reasons, you can't necessarily know it's safe.

It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.

No offense, are you sure you have the technical background required to know that?

It's defenitively not a scam. It does exactly ehat it should and is pretty good at it.

However, especially google is pushing it on everything, even when they are not needed. Punishing search results if they don't enforce https, make it hard to access sites in chrome etc.

I have a static website that takes no user input whatsoever, thus https is pointless and a waste of compute power/energy.

In the end I see the biggest issue in not very tech literate useres thinking everything with https is legit and trustworrhy, while it really isn't.

Your problem seems to be with cert authorities, which is not the same as HTTPS.

I'd be interested in what your solution is that doesn't rely upon a 3rd party to guarantee that a website is ran by who it says it is.

Also if you're complaining that browsers warn the user when using http, that's a complaint about the browser, not HTTPS.

no.