The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based in the United States, recently announced plans to launch a new certificate authority in 2015. While normally, a new cert authority wouldn't be news, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan have worked together with EFF to provide the new service FREE!To put this into perspective, a service such as GoDaddy charges anywhere from $69.99/year up to $199.99/year to add a green padlock to your domain's name in the URL bar. However, a paid service such as GoDaddy also offers advantages such as warranties ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000 which are offerings that have not been announced by the EFF.
While there are other free certificate authorities such as CACert and StartSSL, each of these offers their own disadvantage. CACert has no warranty and won't display a green padlock in the URL bar, while StartSSL only verifies the email and domain name, which would not secure a site for e-commerce.
If implemented correctly, "Let's Encrypt" could start a new era for SSL encryption on websites, making the possibility of having green padlocks on every website into a reality.
