> I don't know why you'd want to just remove the encryption part.

Because encrypting every connection has caused problems.

1. You can't cache anymore. 90% of the web depends on cached content. Always has. We used to use tiers of web caches, to speed up the web, make it more resilient, reduce bandwidth requirements, etc. But encryption everywhere makes that nearly impossible. CDNs have now become the web's cache, which besides the fact that they now control more of the internet, means caching at local or intermediate networks basically isn't possible now so we lose a lot of network performance, reliability, redundancy. This matters more for users in poorer countries, remote areas, natural disasters, war zones, etc, but it affects rich pampered western users too, because ISPs have a harder time (and more expense) dealing with all the traffic.

2. Governments and companies want to inspect traffic. Yes, I get that you don't want them to. But guess what? They do not care what you think. They will force it to happen one way or another, whether it's subverting internet standards, passing laws to defeat encryption or install backdoors, secretly compromising certificate authorities, hacking into the networks of large service providers, or just straight up requiring you to install a custom CA cert (what all companies do now). All of these things, besides being really bad for our civil rights, cause technical issues that are hard to solve and waste time. Before encryption was mandatory, governments and companies were fine with passively inspecting traffic. But now they have no choice but to go full-on MITM, which now gives them the ability to inject as well as inspect, which is even worse. Again: doesn't matter if you don't want them to inspect your traffic, they are going to do it no matter what, for reasons. You may not think they're valid reasons, but the reasons are there and aren't going away, so neither is this arms-race between the people who have to inspect and the people making inspection impossible.

3. Encryption is being used as a planned obsolescence lever. Older machines and software no longer connect to web servers because of course everything now requires encryption, and the old encryption schemes inevitably become insecure and must be replaced. So now we will be even more locked in to a world that constantly requires purchasing more goods and services to do what we could have done with something we purchased 20 years ago. Creates unnecessary waste, consumerism, expense, and just an annoyance that we have to be constantly upgrading rather than using something old and stable and compatible.

4. Obviously, encryption is slower and more complicated than plaintext, increases the complexity of software and the number of bugs, and requires more powerful chips / more memory to do basic operations over a network (ex. embedded apps), but whatever.

> You are rather free to not use HTTPS, but browser vendors are really free to warn against such sites for very good reasons.

First, no, increasingly HTTP is being blocked or unsupported. But secondly, this is like saying browser vendors are really free to do anything they want, including... like I mentioned... putting in integrity without privacy. But they are also "free" not to do that, leading to all the problems I mention and more. So they are "free" to fuck us over, basically.