Ask HN: Why aren't Google, Facebook or Twitter CAs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606869

by niels_olson • 12 years ago

9 10 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It would seem to me that their graphs are stronger predictors of authenticity then government sanctioned ID or financial payments.

PebblesHD• 12 years ago

It would require a massive investment in infrastructure and licensing to become a CA that I suspect the major internet firms are unwilling to pay. The amount of paperwork and day to day management time required to run such an operation would be massive. In this case, unless the government/other certifying body is willing to accept current identifiers from these companies, they gain no benefit from becoming CAs.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

It would require a massive investment in infrastructure and licensing to become a CA that I suspect the major internet firms are unwilling to pay.

Or they could just invest some of the vast pile of cash that some of them (I'm looking at you, Google) have lying around, and buy an existing, widely trusted CA, which would probably be lower-risk than investing in infrastructure and licensing; they still end up with full control of how the CA works going forward either way.

dfc• 12 years ago

Why do you think it would be lower risk?

niels_olson• 12 years ago

I don't see how paperwork is ever an issue for something as far-reaching as Google.

What licensing is involved? How is the day-to-day management even a thing? Didn't Shuttleworth make his money this way?

I would think a graph-backed cert would be an ideal way to authenticate service providers.

icedchai• 12 years ago

Massive investment? Compared to their existing infrastructure, it would be a drop in the bucket.

tedchs• 12 years ago

So, Google is a CA. Check the certificate chain for https://www.google.com: issued by "Google Internet Authority G2".

achernya• 12 years ago

More details on http://pki.google.com/.

michaelchum• 12 years ago

Sorry for my ignorance but what is a CA? Here in Canada, CA stands for Chartered Accountant.

frigg• 12 years ago

CA stands for Certificate Authority in this case.

Ask HN: Why aren't Google, Facebook or Twitter CAs?

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