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john_strinlai 10 hours ago

some immediate thoughts that pop in my head are:

1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:

2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.

it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?

(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)

EvanAnderson 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'll fully admit that I'm "vibe commenting" here out of frustration with the direction society is going.

There won't ever be any consumer protection legislation like I suggested. I know that. It would make things better, but it'll never happen.

Things aren't going to get better for people who don't want to be forced to use new technology. (Eventually it'll be you being forced, too.)

I'm arguing, much in the way some techies bemoan removing malware from their parents' computer as an argument for why we shouldn't be allowed to use our mobile computers for what we want, for businesses to be required to offer ways of interacting to people who don't want to own smartphones. My argument isn't in the interests of powerful lobbies.

My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.

It's not going to get fixed. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares.

john_strinlai 9 hours ago | parent [-]

>out of frustration with the direction society is going.

i am 100% with you.

>My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.

i have been there too, and it drives me mental.

i would love to work on realistic ways of addressing it, because it is a real issue. i am not denying that at all. my whole point, in my original comment, was that a plan of "un-internet the world" is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time and energy to seriously work on. the internet is here -- okay, lets figure it out from there. the genie isnt going back into the bottle. so lets spend our energy on ideas that acknowledge that fact, instead of trying to shove the genie back in.

grishka 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course businesses that wouldn't make sense without technology, like Uber, food delivery, or anything else that is an app anyway, would be exempt.

I'm talking more about things that used to work without the internet for decades just fine but suddenly started requiring the use of the internet. Banks, government agencies, parking, event tickets, etc.

EvanAnderson 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, God... don't even get me started about fucking Ticketmaster and their goddamn app.

I've had multiple venues just straight-up tell me "no app, no entry" when I've contacted them pushing-back on installing Ticketmaster's drek.

For one I was able to play "confused old man" and get printed tickets, at least.

For another I just gave up, swallowed my morals, and loaded their app on my wife's iPhone.

There was one that I just didn't buy tickets for. The performer didn't really need my support, and I wasn't super broken up to not see them, but they lost a sale because of the stupid app requirement.

john_strinlai 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

okay, well i appreciate the clarity. lets flesh it out some more.

how are you determining which businesses are affected? would you apply these regulations to entire industries (e.g. the entire finance industry) or would each business have to be reviewed independently?

if we run with the finance/bank example, what do you do about online-only banks (e.g. WealthSimple)? should they be forced to shut down?

grishka 8 hours ago | parent [-]

My intuition is that it should only apply to businesses that have a physical presence, or need it to do their job. So, for banks, that would be only those with branches. We also have one of those online-only banks (T-Bank, ex Tinkoff), it's overwhelmingly popular among us millennials, but older people use something else.

john_strinlai 8 hours ago | parent [-]

that leaves a pretty big loophole, though. if i am a smaller bank that has 5-20 branches, it might just be in my best interest (profit) to just go online-only instead of implement whatever the regulations deem necessary.

(keeping in mind that this regulation applies to all industries, so the above example of closing all physical operations because the regulations make it more profitable to now be online-only, so that the regulations dont apply, repeats in all industries)

grishka 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And that's fine I guess? It's important that there are banks that are too huge to go online-only.

It will be easier to comply for other industries. From my initial example, for event tickets, they wouldn't care much whether they scan a screen or a piece of paper when you enter, and they could let already-existing box offices sell the tickets. For government agencies, those already have offices, so nothing changes. For parking, just bring back the kiosks.