The disappearance of web material and the rotting of links is itself a major problem. This finding currently encouraging the wholesale breaking of links by moving from http: to https: , perhaps doing more damage to the web than any other change in its history.

The TAG can't publish this finding without addressing this issue. Things which need to be discussed could include

• Actually dropping the 's' (which was possibly originally a mistake) but using encryption for all HTTP
• Allowing a website to declare in a machine-readable way to that http: and https: URIs in a given space are equivalent;
• Recommendation for web client libraries to find such information and treat it automatically.
  etc

Search engines which trawl the whole web s and not s anyway will be able to figure out easily where the s makes no difference, but general application code and libraries won't unless it is codified.