why are CAs charging so much for certs anyway? (Re: End of the line for Ireland's dotcom star)

[Adam Back]

Saw this on theregister.co.uk: geotrust is undercutting veri$ign at
$159/cert vs $350/cert by verisign and $199 by Thawte (which as you
note is just a verisign brand at this point).

	http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/67/33009.html

You'd have thought there would be plenty of scope for certs to be sold
for a couple of $ / year.  Eg. by one of the registrars bundling a
cert with your domain registration.  I mean if someone can provide DNS
service for $10 or less / year (and lower for some tlds) which
requires servers to answer queries etc., surely they can send a you a
few more bits (all they have to do is make sure they send the cert to
the person who they register the domain for).

>From what I heard Mark Shuttleworth (of Thawte) got his cert in the
browser DBs for free just for the asking by being in the right place
at the right time.  So once you have that charging > $100 for a few
seconds of CPU time to sign a cert is a license to print money.

With all the .com crashes you'd think the price of a root cert ought
to be pretty low by now.

Adam

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 01:15:22PM -0400, Anton Stiglic wrote:
> 
> > Why is it that none of those 100-odd companies with keys in the browsers
> > are doing anything with them?  Verisign has such a central role in
> > the infrastructure, but any one of those other companies could compete.
> > Why isn't anyone undercutting Verisign's prices?  Look what happened with
> > Thawte when it adopted this strategy: Mark Shuttleworth got to visit Mir!
> 
> And Thawte got bought by Verisign, so no more competition...
> Interestingly, last time I checked, it was cheaper to buy from Thawte than 
> it was from Verisign directly.
> 
> --Anton
> 
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