Certificates, Attributes, Web of Trust

[Wei Dai]

On Fri, 6 Oct 1995, Jeff Weinstein wrote:
 
>   If you take a look at verisign's home page, they will be offering
> "low assurance" certificates for free for non-commercial uses.  The
> only thing they will guarantee about these certs is that the subject
> name in the certificate is unique across all certificates signed
> by their class I CA.  You should be able to get one of these
> certs in real time via an HTML form.
 
What is the point of this?  What is to prevent someone from
getting certificates for a million of the most common and/or famous names
as quickly as possible?
 
Wei Dai