[code_reuse]

I view this as an attempt by various power brokers to subvert the power of the World Wide Web by attacking it's decentralized nature. In the beginning (like now) it'll be relatively simple for everyone to get their hands on the SSL cert they need, but the risk is that in the future, after support for HTTP has been reduced it could become more difficult to acquire the certificates required to deliver the user experience that you wish to deliver (not just in terms of price, but in terms of censorship).

In addition to making the web more centralized, forcing everyone into HTTPS actually makes it much easier to effect broad scale traffic analysis. On top of that many info-sec experts suspect that the actual cipher in play here may eventually be proven to have significant weaknesses at some future date. AND HTTPS is more expensive to support in terms of bandwidth, CPU, and increased latency. It could result it more coal being burned each year to push all of those extra bytes around.

[walterbell]

In such a scenario, wouldn't an alternative/forked browser emerge with support for an HTTP/anonymous web?

There is also censorship risk in named-data and content-centric networking, which offer multicast and caching benefits, but rely on uniquely identified content.

[code_reuse]

certainly there will always be alternative browsers, but since they would be used by a small minority the censors would effectively have the ability to determine which publishers are "cleared" to reach out to the most broad demographics. That alone would be enough if your censorship goal was to be able to sway public sentiment.