EV SSL is a bit of a scam. It's basically a band-aid solution to a more fundamental problem—a breakdown in the chain of trust due to the lack of regulation in the issuing of SSL certificates. EV SSL certificates are basically there to do what regular SSL certificates were doing 10 years ago: to verify that a website is who it claims to be. That's why a chain of trust was created from the root CAs to make sure any site possessing an SSL certificate signed by a CA was on the level.
The reason you pay a CA an annual fee instead of creating a free self-signed certificate is because you need someone in the chain of trust to vouch for your identity. If the root CA is trusted, and they vouch for another CA, who in turn vouches for another CA, who vouches for another CA, who then vouches for somebank.com, then the chain of trust ensures that everyone is who they are, and the end user knows that somebank.com is really owned by Some Bank.
But for this to work, CAs need to do their homework and exercise some discretion in who they vouch for. If they certify another CA, they need to make sure that CA is trustworthy. If they certify a website, then they need to make sure it's not a phishing site posing as another company. That's the only reason to pay a CA for a signed certificate—because they're supposed to verify each site is owned by who they claim to be before issuing a certificate. And they're meant to verify this each year.
The creation of EV SSL is basically admitting that the original chain of trust is broken, that now there are CAs in the chain of trust that are neglecting their duty. So now we're going to create a new name for trustworthy certificates and make that the new standard. This basically makes all regular signed certificates worthless since end users can't trust that an SSL certificate signed by a trusted CA is actually any better than a self-signed certificate or one signed by an unknown company.
The real solution is to fix the chain of trust and force CAs to actually vet their certificate recipients and do their job. If a CA isn't doing its job, then it needs to be removed from the chain of trust. And this accountability should be required all the way up the chain to root CAs. Otherwise, we'll just end up with another level of certificates 10 years from now when commercial competition drives the price/quality of EV certificates down too.
