"Users can pick whatever CA they trust or whatever CA their technical friends and family recommends they trust."
Which means you'll wind up with the situation we have with TLS: hundreds of CAs, all trusted by default, most not even remotely trustworthy. Users will have no idea about these CAs and so the CAs will never have to worry about being loose with certificates.
I sure hope we'd be smarter about it this time. I envision something more like the average user chooses from, i.e., Canonical and Microsoft, while a more technical user would choose one of those and also install his own self-signed root as a CA.
So you would have one or a group of companies gain full control over what programs are allowed to be installed on your operating system?
You believe an amateur software developer should have to pay to get her app signed by a CA before she is able to distribute it? That someone else gets a say over whether or not a person can build an application?
And what if that CA gets popped? What if that CA makes a mistake? Do you furthermore think that even semi-technical people will think about these things enough to pick individual CAs?
There are a dozen problems with what you're saying, and I think you know it. What I really wonder is why you're coming into this conversation at such an intellectually dishonest angle, like you've never seen the arguments for/against what you're proposing before.
1. A company you trust is acceptable as a CA. Nowhere did I say it had to be a company. I said users pick the CA's they trust.
2. If they want to distribute it with that CA. Nowhere did I say CA's must require payments. Yes a CA gets a say in who they will verify. That's the point.
3. If the CA gets "popped" or makes a mistake you remove them from your trust list. I don't expect regular people to know how to do this, but they could ask someone they know.
4. You didn't even read my arguments, you are attacking things I didn't say, so you are being intellectually dishonest, not I.
