With the advent of the CABforum as a trade group for commercial CAs designed to keep everyone out that isn’t looking to make a big buck out of others you’d think the browsers with their cries of standards and openness so they don’t get locked out by Microsoft wouldn’t be so quick to jump on this band wagon, but the complete opposite is true.

So what should we do as users, well as one person pointed out they plan to boycott all Microsoft products that contain additions to their software that supports EV certificates but we can do much more then that. Remember the only ones to benefit from this are large commercial CAs such as Verisign, and browsers via kick backs, although it seems Verisign has spun this so well they won’t need to pay anyone a cent.

This will effect the 99% of small businesses (or even medium sized business) that can’t justify spending the big bucks to get EV certificates, it will effect partnerships, sole traders and even in most cases Universities. If you ever expect to get an EV cert and you’re not a bank or big company, well forget it, even if you had the money to cover it, the standard is set so high that you wouldn’t be eligible in any case.

If you ever thought of running a business over the internet now is the time to have your say otherwise it could be too late to voice an opinion.

EV certs are being touted by Microsoft as preventing phishing, but as so few phishing attacks utilise SSL at present this claim is laughable at best.