"forcing browsers green-light weak security is a violation of the USA's 1st amendment freedom of speech."
I understand the issues mentioned in passing scammy actors as legitimate but, in which way your rights to speech would be vulnerated?
I understand the issues mentioned in passing scammy actors as legitimate but, in which way your rights to speech would be vulnerated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech
Whether or not it would violate the 1st amendment would be up to the courts to decide.
You might object to this for other reasons, but free speech isn't a good reason.
That's because it's commercial speech [0] attached to a sale of a product, which gets a reduced level of protection. I'm don't think that you could, in the US, compel non-commercial software to express messages like "We trust this CA". Mozilla has a 1st amendment right to not trust to CA's, and to tell their users why they don't trust the CA; to boycott a CA; to implement this in code and ship it.
[0] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11072 ("The First Amendment: Categories of Speech")
Nothing so far says that Mozilla can't tell its users that EU trusts this but Mozilla doesn't. However it is clear that it is intended to force Mozilla to at least gives the user the choice to trust EU on this.
The decision of trusting or not trusting a CA has an expressive character; it's not pure machine math. Some of the decisions are political speech, even: "we don't like the policies of country X, therefore we'll boycott their root certificate". (Roughly characterized)