Get HTTPS to 90% (was: HTTP is just fine)

Chris Hofmann wrote on 25.11.2015 20:51:
> In this way we might attract more people to take action.  Al of those
> people might*want*  there personal blogs using https if they knew to might
> be helpful toward these causes.  All of the people running sites and were
> having their economic value taxes/stripped off by ISPs might want to
> implement https.  All of the users that viewed http content might*want*  to
> be advocates to these parties to make sure the stay on track for making
> https as wide spread as possible (even if not ubiquitous).
>
> One thing I might disagree with Eric on is either the ability or the need
> to*force*  ubiquity.
>
> I think we need just enough compliance to make the incentives low for bad
> actors to want to take advantage of.  That will help "preserve the
> leafs/decentralization/http" for some possible valuable things in the
> future.    The challenge here is that "Just enough compliance" is still a
> pretty high bar in this case.

I completely agree with this. Making TLS easier to deploy is great. 
Effectively forcing it is not great.

Once you have all the big sites on SSL-only, you probably have 80% of 
the internet traffic and 95% of commercially interesting traffic on SSL 
only. That should meet your defined "bar".

We might be getting there just by discouraging password forms to be on 
non-https pages. I know that one of the biggest German ISPs are 
switching their portal to https only precisely because of this 
particular change in Firefox 44 (IIRC), and they'll switch in January. 
Many of the big portals have accounts (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, 
ISP frontpages with their webmail etc.), so that alone might be 
sufficient to reach 60% of Internet traffic.

If we get the big newspaper sites to enable TLS as well, we're probably 
at 90%. These news sites are holding off mostly because of advertizing 
networks. So, that's the angle to improve here.

The "long tail" of small sites are probably 98% of the sites in numbers, 
but only 10% in traffic. Still they are important for free speech and 
the freedom and innovation of the web.

Ben