I think your description of the situation is rather overblown. Having HTTPS support will only get you a very minor boost in rankings.
Additionally, discussing things in a forum usually doesn't get things moving. It's coming out with actual advancements like the original Chrome beta with V8 that drives innovation.
I think that the solution to harmful dictatorship should be good alternatives, not more laws to shackle progress to humongous councils.
"Having HTTPS support will only get you a very minor boost in rankings."
If your livelihood depends on getting traffic from Google - and a lot of sites do - then even a minor boost may equal a lot of money. Plus the fact that you can never know quite how much, so to be safe you must assume it's worthwhile.
The problem I have with this move is that to me it appears as Google are furthering their own political agenda. They want the web to be https, so they penalise sites that are not. It would be different if the argument was that sites on https tend to hold more quality content than non-https sites, but that doesn't seem to be the reasoning.
Why is "quality content" an objective measure and "user security and privacy" a political agenda?
I agree that it's dangerous for one entity to have so much power over the web, but I don't see how is this particular signal any different from any other they already use, including those which define the quality of the content.
Additionally, discussing things in a forum usually doesn't get things moving. It's coming out with actual advancements like the original Chrome beta with V8 that drives innovation.
I think that the solution to harmful dictatorship should be good alternatives, not more laws to shackle progress to humongous councils.