As there are many regulations and court cases in the EU and the US (and I presume in other places as well) aimed at some of the richest companies in the world that have to do with browsers behavior it seems that they would have to know what a browser is.
Even if I didn't know the word 'train' I think most reasonable users of English would still agree that I know what a train is.
People who use a browser to go on the web, even if they don't know the name for the category of application they are using is "browser" and all the technical functioning of the browser and how the internet works, can be said in normal English usage to know what a browser is - it is one of a class of applications that they use to go on the web.
They click on an icon, a window opens up they go on the internet. The "browser"
You'd think they would have to know what a browser is. Certainly some people within the courts and legislative bodies do. But, I challenge the "have to," because I want to give credence to my anecdotal theory that a ton of people have no idea, especially older people, and most politicians are super old. Why do they "have to?" Couldn't a lot of boneheaded decisions we've seen over the years be because they don't understand? They could maliciously be applying law per their lobbyist needs, which is probably a thing that happens, but they also could just be ignorant.
Remember "series of tubes?" What about David Cameron's push in 2014 to "protect kids from porn" that was really just a PRC style great firewall? Pretend it wasn't a malicious attempt at massive state surveillance - how does it stop kids from getting porn from Twitter, Youtube? Anybody with a glancing familiarity with the internet would know why stopping porn is essentially impossible without blocking literally EVERYTHING and creating a country intranet, combined with a massive, pervasive state surveillance operation with police that have broad powers. Impossible in a liberal democracy (the effective porn blocking, not the attempts to have pervasive state surveillance - the issues come when it's time to start arresting).
Some quotes from when Zuckerberg was in front of congress:
"If I’m emailing within WhatsApp … does that inform your advertisers?" Senator Brian Schatz
"What was Facemash?" Senator Billy Long
"How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?" Orrin Hatch (the "senator... we run ads" quote)
Why are so many politicians opposed to encryption? Because they're fascists that want better state surveillance? Maybe, but I think more likely is they hear that it makes it harder for the FBI to track down two murderers in San Bernadino and they think "Encryption? Affecting law enforcement? Do we need it? Just make it illegal."
Tangent: This makes me wonder about a broader topic I've been questioning: I think we assign too much competence and reasoning to eachother and to our leaders. Random examples: Musk put a big flashing X on the roof of the twitter offices, it's obviously against code, it's obviously horrible, but there are people arguing "Genius marketing move! No press is bad press!" Really? Or, when Bezos climbed into a rocket. "He wouldn't get into it if he wasn't sure it was mostly safe. You don't get to be a billionaire without knowing what you're doing." A couple years later and a submarine that the most layperson of laypeople would point out is a deathtrap proves that idea wrong.
This on top of the fact that sometimes it seems like entire financial markets depend on people making "rational" decisions. A housing crash because "the banks would never maintain these portfolios as AA if they weren't rock-solid!" A dot-com crash because "www is the future, it'll make money somehow!" It keeps happening. We keep giving ourselves way too much credit. I think climate change is going to be the greatest example of this, should we survive it. "We'll let it go far, but not past a certain point. Someone will stop this before it's actually irreversible. Or if necessary, at some point, the people will rise up and destroy oil pipelines." No, I don't think so, I think we'll keep thinking we're too smart to let something like that happen.
I don't think knowing what something is requires a deep understanding of the technical workings of that thing, in normal usage of English do you know something relates to do you have some familiarity with the existence of the thing.
IF someone said Bryan doesn't even know what a car is you would wonder "how could he not know what a car?" is as opposed to thinking yes well lots of people have a limited, superficial, or extremely incorrect understanding of the workings of the modern automobile.
My example is a bunch of old people that don't use trains and have never used trains, legislating things about trains. "What, you can't take it directly to your destination? That sounds pointless, why don't we just rip up the tracks to add more lanes for cars?"
They don't understand technology and they aren't even users of the technology they're legislating about.
If you think it unlikely that there's people that don't use browsers, come to my next family reunion or city council meeting.
given the statistic cited earlier of over 5 billion people using the internet and there are 7.8 billion people in the world, 1.4 billion of them in China, which has slightly over 1 billion on the internet, 1.4 billion in India, which has evidently 759 million on the internet, etc. etc. I think it is most likely that we find the largest concentrations of people without internet in non-Western countries and in less developed regions.
>My example is a bunch of old people
There are nearly 270 thousand people age 75 and over in the world, that age being also over the age of retirement in many places. I doubt you are actually discussing people that are 75 and over.
How old are these "old" people that don't use browsers?
Consider that IE6 was released in 2001, 22 years ago. Someone 33 years old at that time would be 55 now. Probably a good age for a legislator.
I never said it was unlikely that people don't use browsers, but given the statistics outlined above it seems statistically unlikely that there would be a significant concentration of them in any group legislating the internet, although you seem invested in the idea that this is so.
Do I think it is possible that if I went to your family reunion would I meet someone who did not use browsers - sure - also if I went to your city council meeting. Assuming 12 people on the council a naive calculation of 5 billion internet users on the planet would lead me to saying maybe 5 don't, but given the other factors outlined here I would think it statistically strange if it were more than 2.
What percentage of people at your family reunion, and city council meeting, do you think do not use browsers and if it is anomalous in relation to the statistics outlined here - how do you account for this anomaly?
on edit: also I live in Denmark, every politician here knows how trains work and has probably spent a significant amount of their life commuting on trains.
on second edit: regarding your previous example of encryption; the difference between encryption and a browser is the difference between lithium-ion batteries and Electric cars. The first is a functionality of an application, the second is an application.
Pretty much everyone has an understanding of the application and what they do to make it work, hardly anyone has understanding of how the underlying technology works. It may be useful to have people who know how the underlying technology works to legislate on it, but not knowing how HTTPS works or how the browser interprets the file formats it receives back from a request is not the same as not knowing what a browser is and I originally responded to the suggestion that people did not know what a browser is.
Regarding old age - I can see that in the U.S the median age of U.S. senators is 65 and the median age of representatives in the House is 58, so in the case of those age 65 I would be willing to suppose there is a larger percentage of them who do not know what a browser is - so maybe 40% of those over 65 do not know, and with vanishingly smaller numbers as you get closer to 50.
There's 14 senators 50 and younger, I bet all of them know what a browser is.