I have to say, I find this article highly insulting. People who are skeptical of trends being pushed in the technology ecosystem are not the same as anti-vaxxers. Frankly, people who think that blindly following the edicts of self interested corporations will keep them safe are the ones who are deluded.

There are many good reasons to be suspicious of calls to deprecate things. Very often, when Google, Apple, or Microsoft announce that something is being deprecated, it is of no benefit to the end user, and is just a flimsy way of covering up a feature regression, or worse, a self serving attack on a technology that competes with their own.

Was anyone asking for the "save" feature to be removed from HTML5 video? Does anyone seriously think that the locking down of app stores is about helping the user be secure, and not about stamping out competition?

There is no rational reason to not continue to support HTTP indefinitely. The fact that a user could potentially be tricked into going to an insecure site means absolutely nothing, because a user could be tricked into doing anything.

The fact that a browser might not give me, the user, the choice to do something potentially dangerous is ridiculous. HTTPS is not, and probably will never be as easy to set up as HTTP. Even if you had a script that could automatically configure my server, and continue to work reliably indefinitely (and you don't) it would still be inferior to HTTP.

I can access a service over HTTP from over a decade ago, and it will still work. I want to be able to, if I want to, with little effort, set up a server that can be accessed by a web browser. I do not want to have to have any third parties involved. I also do not want to have to set up a certificate authority or anything like that.

Companies like Google benefit from making the rules of what a web browser should be. They are happy to take the hit, if it makes it harder for everyone else. Does anyone think that Amazon.com wants to pay sales taxes? No, but by pressuring the government to collect taxes on them, it harms their competition more.