The only reason why I suggested Verisign is because they have been in the industry long enough to know what they are doing (presumably) and not make the same mistakes that were made in the past.
Worst case scenario - if Verisign doesn't want to share the toys in the sandbox, Microsoft/Google/Mozilla et all can just refuse to include their CA certs as trusted certs.
However, Verisign is in a very interesting position as they currently manage/control .com tld.
So what I'm saying is - if the children don't agree to play together then they can take their toys and go home then no one can play.
(I like to use the analogy of children and these big companies because, in my opinion, it appears that's how they operate. They just can't come together, like mature adults, and form some sort of solution to this. Last I heard is that Google wants to show an error page for non-HTTPS enabled sites, on Chrome, which will make everything even worse[1]. Don't even get me started on the whole self-signed cert error message page...).
[1] - http://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-...
