The standard access to these sites is sufficient, and the potential benefits do not justify the feasibility of enabling HTTPS. If Google’s plan is implemented and successful, then many archiving websites will gradually become unattended, which is like a large-scale burning book in the digital age. Most archive sites don’t collect user data or have no user interaction at all, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t enable HTTPS. The Internet is an open platform, not an enterprise platform. Its definition is its stability. Google is a guest of the Internet like us, and guests can’t make rules.
Did Google’s promotion of HTTPS go astray?
The Google Security Blog earlier announced that Chrome 68, which will release in July 2018, will mark HTTP sites as insecure. The search giant also plans to reduce the ranking of HTTP sites in search results. Senior software developer Dave Winer criticised Google’s plan. He pointed out:
“A lot of the web consists of archives. Files put in places that no one maintains. They just work. There’s no one there to do the work that Google wants all sites to do. And some people have large numbers of domains and sub-domains hosted on all kinds of software Google never thought about. Places where the work required to convert wouldn’t be justified by the possible benefit. The reason there’s so much diversity is that the web is an open thing, it was never owned….
If Google succeeds, it will make a lot of the web’s history inaccessible. People put stuff on the web precisely so it would be preserved over time. That’s why it’s important that no one has the power to change what the web is. It’s like a massive book burning, at a much bigger scale than ever done before.“
