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Comment by GoblinSlayer | Hacker News Reader

An old idea that internet access should require certification like a car.

It's possible to exist in modern society without a drivers's license. I'm not sure the same is true for the internet anymore.

Drivers find it quite uncomfortable to be without a car. If they don't use internet from birth, they shouldn't miss it. Or it can be an internet cafe or ATM/kiosk (for a public transport system).

Too many institutions now presume internet access for that to be true, even here in Germany, despite many of the people around me with the meme that German bureaucracy is pre-digital.

And I have a driving licence, but have had no need to drive since moving to Berlin.

> Too many institutions now presume internet access

That should be (more of) a cause for concern, imho.

ATMs use internet, but don't give too much control to the user.

I'm not talking about ATMs. I'm taking about government functions, banking (can't invest shares on an ATM), taxation, how to find out which services can be accessed where and when, what schedule changes are planned for public transport, collecting parcels that have been redirected and finding out where they were redirected to, doctor appointments, and so on.

Sometimes these things can be done without internet, but not always, and the current trend is moving more things online-only.

Flaming hot take: the Internet was better in the past because only developed nations had access to it. As soon as mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry and BRIC countries and the like had easy access to it, the quality of everything plummeted. The amount of bad actors that flooded into the system was astronomical.

When spam started to flood the early internet, it wasn’t from the BRIC countries.

Not blaming BRIC countries here, but the really intense spamming started post-early internet. You can see the spike up in the early around 2003-4:

https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/

Those graphs are way too late. I was specifically thinking of the wave starting with the Canter and Siegel “Green Card” spam in 1994.

Hot countertake: No nation has a monopoly on jackasses and the majority of problems in my life caused by misinformation on the Internet came from my fellow Americans.

Finally someone said it. This is why I’m not keen on IPv6.

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