Just saying though, I do not believe there is some big conspiracy theory, but I think it is probable.
Dude, have you really never heard of Verisign before this? They've been giving very basic certs for SSH and such for years. Any argument against them is an argument against ANY 'authority' giving certs.
Ah, interesting typo/slip there. SSH is actually designed to operate very differently then ssl, and is the counter example for showing that ssl got it wrong by combing two separate things, identity and secure transmissions. People read way too much into ssl certificates and now even go so far as calling self made certificates worthless, yet when done right they can be more secure then the ones you pay for. The whole industry has been a very profitable snake oil business with Verisign being one of the big winners, and of course Thawte also being in early to and making a lots of money getting bought out by Verisign. It became a big lottery if you happened to be a ca that got into the early list of trusted certificates included into the popular browsers. This snakeoil would probably have stopped being profitable if the browsers themselves did not also now start to want to charge money to include new roots and instead included places like cacert's root. The prices charged for these is way out of line with the costs they take because of this artificial scarcity not because of any real security.