Editing Public key infrastructure (section)

==== Issuer market share ====
In this model of trust relationships, a CA is a trusted third party – trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate.

According to NetCraft report from 2015,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/05/13/counting-ssl-certificates.html|title=Counting SSL certificates|date=13 May 2015 }}</ref> the industry standard for monitoring active [[Transport Layer Security]] (TLS) certificates, states that "Although the global [TLS] ecosystem is competitive, it is dominated by a handful of major CAs — three certificate authorities ([[NortonLifeLock|Symantec]], [[Sectigo]], [[GoDaddy]]) account for three-quarters of all issued [TLS] certificates on public-facing web servers. The top spot has been held by Symantec (or [[VeriSign]] before it was purchased by Symantec) ever since [our] survey began, with it currently accounting for just under a third of all certificates. To illustrate the effect of differing methodologies, amongst the million busiest sites Symantec issued 44% of the valid, trusted certificates in use — significantly more than its overall market share."

Following major issues in how certificate issuing was managed, all major players gradually distrusted Symantec-issued certificates, starting in 2017 and completed in 2021.<ref>{{cite web |title=CA:Symantec Issues |url=https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:Symantec_Issues |website=Mozilla Wiki |access-date=10 January 2020 |ref=symantec-mozilla}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Chrome's Plan to Distrust Symantec Certificates |url=https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html |website=Google security blog |access-date=10 January 2020 |ref=symantec-chrome}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=JDK-8215012 : Release Note: Distrust TLS Server Certificates Anchored by Symantec Root CAs |url=https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=8215012 |website=Java Bug Database |access-date=10 January 2020 |ref=symantec-java}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |date=2023-09-05 |title=Information about distrusting Symantec certificate authorities |url=https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208860 |access-date=2024-01-16 |website=Apple Support |language=en}}</ref>