If you're talking about technical capability, yeah, no contest here.
But if EC can legislate e-signatures into existence, then it follows that they can also legislate browsers into accepting Q certs, can they not?
Mind you, they did exactly that with document signing. They made a piece of paper say three things: 1) e-signatures made by private keys matching Qualified™ Certificates are legally equivalent to written signatures, 2) all authorities are required to accept e-signatures, 3) here's how to get qualified certificates.
Upon reading this enchated scroll, 3) magically spawned and went to live its own way. ID cards issued here to every citizen are smartcards preloaded with private keys for which you can download an X.509 cert good for everydoy use. The hard part was 2), because we needed to equip and retrain every single civil servant, big number of them were older people not happy to change the way they work. But it happened.
So if the hard part is building and the easy part is regulating, and they have prior art already exercised, then why bother competing with Google, on a loss leader, with taxpayer funds. And with non-technical feature, but a regulatory one, which would most likely case the technical aspects like performance and plugin availability to be neglected.
But if EC can legislate e-signatures into existence, then it follows that they can also legislate browsers into accepting Q certs, can they not?
Mind you, they did exactly that with document signing. They made a piece of paper say three things: 1) e-signatures made by private keys matching Qualified™ Certificates are legally equivalent to written signatures, 2) all authorities are required to accept e-signatures, 3) here's how to get qualified certificates.
Upon reading this enchated scroll, 3) magically spawned and went to live its own way. ID cards issued here to every citizen are smartcards preloaded with private keys for which you can download an X.509 cert good for everydoy use. The hard part was 2), because we needed to equip and retrain every single civil servant, big number of them were older people not happy to change the way they work. But it happened.
So if the hard part is building and the easy part is regulating, and they have prior art already exercised, then why bother competing with Google, on a loss leader, with taxpayer funds. And with non-technical feature, but a regulatory one, which would most likely case the technical aspects like performance and plugin availability to be neglected.