Who says what an authoritarian state is? The reason there are a lot of CAs and some of them are governments is that having rules and policies for what it takes to be a CA is way better than having some random neckbeard at a browser maker deciding he read something in the newspaper yesterday about your country he didn't like, so you can't be a CA.
If you wanted to, you could build a browser that's a fork of Firefox/Chrome, and just doesn't show the padlock when a CA that you believe is under the thumb of an authoritarian state is the signer. However you would then have to exclude all American and British CA's, which would then exclude most SSLd sites, thus making your fork not much different to just deciding to never show any padlock at all and assert that everything is insecure so fuck it, let's (not) go shopping.
OK ..... back here in reality, real browser makers understand that there are more adversaries than governments, and actually SSL was designed to make online shopping safer, not be a tool of revolution. Judged by the "make shopping safer" standard it does a pretty great job. Judged by the "fight repressive regime and save the world" standard, it still does a surprisingly good job - the NSA doesn't seem to like it much at all - but it's unrealistic to expect an internet protocol designed in the mid 90s to do that.
Even if Jesus Christ managed a certificate authority, someone would complain. Everyone - even G-d - has a conflict of interest.
There's clearly some good people working at worthwhile things at Google. My concern is that a lot of those things doesn't end up being pushed by Google. Not only because it might hurt themselves, but because of non-obvious outside influence.
We shouldn't forget that many things we accuse the NSA for like lack of accountability, overzealous collection of data, the undermining of privacy etc. are all things we can expect from a corporation.
My point was that everyone has self interest, if one that's influential and has resources comes up with a proposal that is reasonably transparent and beneficial, it seems self-destructive to reject it out of distrust.
I just think the US government is the best organization in the world in asserting pressure and that Google, even if they really wanted to (which isn't clear), isn't going to end up with an agenda hugely contradictory to the US governments wishes. The US has a long history of using industry for geopolitical goals and the tech industry isn't any different.
If we do end up with a system that is in line with peoples fundamental rights I'll be the first one to commend them for it though.
You're right to say that the PKI doesn't work if you just want to trust any site that shows a padlock in the address bar, but it's useful if you do a little work.
Not it isn't. It still suffers from not respecting name constraints. You can't setup trust for only a list of domains. If i run my own CA for some list of domains, there is no way i can prevent my CA from being able to sign for google.com. Instead people use wildcard certs so they can be delegated responsibility for a subdomain.
If name constraints were implemented more widely, that'd be great. But someone has to write the code, debug it, ship it, etc, and then you have to wait until lots of people have upgraded, etc, and ultimately wildcard certs work well enough.
Without name constraints I assert the system is inherently broken. You cannot limit trust other than yes/no.
> ultimately wildcard certs work well enough.
Well enough is arguable. The problem is that your attack surface grows with each machine rather than having a private key per machine.
FTFY.