+1 on behalf of Google Chrome

[asirap]

Google has long sought to provide secure web communications with Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), and is committed to offering HTTPS for increasingly more of its services. We support a safe web ecosystem.

In this vein, Google strongly supports the White House’s proposed “HTTPS-Only Standard” to provide people — throughout the United States and the world — exclusively secure access to U.S. Government services. When interacting with the government, whether for taxes, immigration, Social Security, voter registration, healthcare, or any other public service, people have a critical need for the information they send and receive to be confidential and untampered. HTTPS is the minimum requirement for achieving this, and Google is pleased to see the White House recognize this need.

The proposal also further highlights the need for the entire web to meet this minimum standard, as the World Wide Web Consortium’s Technical Architecture Group recently highlighted as a finding: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/web-https:

"Over the last 25 years, the Web has grown into a platform for much of the world’s communication, whether it be information sharing, community building, commerce, education, social networking, or underpinning applications.

In meeting these needs, the Web’s trustworthiness has become critical to its success. If a person cannot trust that they are communicating with the party they intend, they can’t use the Web to shop safely; if they cannot be assured that Web-delivered news isn’t modified in transit, they won’t trust it as much. If someone cannot be assured that they’re talking only to the intended recipients, they might avoid social networking."

This proposal is an important way for the United States Government to help protect the privacy and security of citizens on the web and lead the way in the digital world.