Browsers stopped showing the banner a couple of years ago[1-3], around the time of the Ian Carroll’s Stripe, Inc. of Kentucky demonstration[4]; maybe that was it?

It caused a great outcry from CAs, and I would’ve normally been against a single-sided, mostly Google-driven change like this, but the discussion[5] shows, at least as I read it, that CAs are unwilling to clearly communicate that the EV “green bar” does not imply “trustworthy”, it just upgrades “you have been securely connected to satan.com”, an authenticated DNS name, to “you have been securely connected to Satan LLC”, an authenticated legal-entity name.

And as Stripe, Inc., of Kentucky shows, it’s not clear this is an upgrade at all, because while the rules for domain uniqueness in the DNS are relatively (barring IDNA) straightforward and well-known, the rules for uniqueness for names of legal entities are complex and dependent on jurisdiction to such an extent that neither users nor even CAs can be reasonably expected to follow them all. (I think one discussion on the CA/Browser Forum list mentioned that—forget state-scoped legal names in the US Stripe case—Germany has township-scoped legal names, so jurisdictionOfIncorporation would literally have to record, and UAs to show, the address of a specific town hall in Germany. Sure you know which one it should be?) Even today you will find CA websites[6-8] proudly proclaiming “customers think the EV green bar means trustworthy” (and, presumably, if they don’t, you should teach them to). Except it doesn’t, and believing it does is harmful for users, so into the dustbin of history it goes.

(Of course, the conventional legal system is not completely clueless about this namespace issue and in most countries implements “field of endeavour”-scoped trademarks as a solution, but the issue of jurisdiction on a global Internet, as opposed to a billboard in your hometown, is only somewhat attenuated, and the discussion seems to show CAs were unwilling to move away from “green bar = secure” marketing, which is harmful however you spin it.)

There’s a more general line of research on the uselessness of positive security indicators, that first entered the public eye perhaps with Moxie Marlinspike’s green-padlock-favicon demonstration[9] at Black Hat 2009. The Google announcement page[1] links to some later developments in that respect. Chrome later phased out “secure” for HTTPS sites completely in favour of showing “not secure” for HTTP ones, highlighted in red once a password input or similar appears[10].

Fortunately for you if you want your EV TLS certs back, the corpse seems to be in the process of being raised[11,12] through the necromantic power of money and government coercion. (What is it about PKI that drives everywhere bureaucrats so wild?..)

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572936

[3] https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...

[4] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...

[5] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.security.policy/c/iV...

[6] https://www.digicert.com/faq/when-to-use-ev-ssl.htm

[7] https://www.globalsign.com/en/blog/why-ev-ssl-is-here-to-sta...

[8] https://www.thesslstore.com/new-to-ssl/is-ev-worth-it.aspx

[9] https://vimeo.com/50018478, slides at https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-09/Marlinspike/...

[10] https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here...

[11] https://scotthelme.co.uk/looks-like-a-duck-swims-like-a-duck...

[12] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/what-duck-why-eu-propo...