The Internet: Digital Exclusion

The modern large Internet-based business seems only to cater for what it perceives as its own abstract generic customer, who has the profile of a young to 40s middle to higher educated reasonably salaried person. That's its mainstream fast-moving market that sits nicely in the middle of its market's standard distribution bell curve. This is capitalism, which is fine for non-vital products or services in a market with a large number of truly independent competing suppliers.

However, to provide a service like the Internet, which, as explicitly declared within the Internet Bill of Rights is essential to the practice of citizenship, this is definitely not the way to do it. The provider must not tune his market to include only the most profitable segment, while side-lining those who are not worth serving. He must inc­lude everybody equally. That includes the old, infirm, deficient and inept. All must be equally facilitated to participate, without selective prejudice.

This requirement is wholly incompatible with the capitalist tenet to maximise profit by maximising revenue and minimising cost. They just don't mix. For this reason, the provision of a service to the public, which is legally defined as essential to the practice of citizenship, can never be entrusted to private hands; as is well evinced by my own experience of internet service provision in Brazil, it simply doesn't work.

The Private Provider

The generic customer of the private provider has good vision. He can read the tiny print on a tiny smartphone's screen without difficulty. He is dexterous. He can enter data precisely and accurately on a tiny touch keyboard whose keys are less than a quarter the size of a human finger-tip. How often have I seen young women typing away rapidly on their smartphones using only the edges of their thumb nails. Al­though I would wager that their typing speed in this situation is nowhere near my rate on my computer keyboard with its standard 19 by 19 mm keys.

This young generic customer also has well imprinted in his mind the perceptibility to instantly dismiss interloping jazzy adverts in order to concentrate on navigating the labyrinth of menus needed to arrive at his desired objective. He has grown up with the scene and knows the corporate psych of the user interface. He has dev­eloped an imperviousness to the commercial interface designer's self-indulgent high-tech graphical wank, which even exacerbates the customer's tribulation when reporting a fault by exploiting it as what he thinks is an advertising opportunity.

The Problem For The Old

Notwithstanding the glossy propaganda about how the old are taking well to mod­ern technology, it is irrefutable that the old have enormous difficulty with the user interfaces of both government and commercial websites. They say this is because the old haven't grown up with information technology the way the young have.

I am 82 years old. I have been programming computers for 60 years. I have recent­ly written a 7000 line C-program for a communications command and control appli­c­a­tion, with its own graphics user interface. All straight out of my head. It includes a function for tracking the moon to within one minute of arc, with reference only to universal standard time. Lack of computer knowledge is not the problem.

Yet I am almost always totally banjaxed by the user interfaces of most modern web sites and 'apps'. I find them irritating, frustrating and exceedingly difficult to use. Strange? No. We're considering here two entirely different and separate things:

1. The logic and structure of a computer program and of the language in which it is written;

2. The mathematical, physical, engineering or administrative system it is used to construct and bring to life.

I would describe my communications command and control program mentioned above as being of the mathematical, physical and engineering kind — perhaps with some aspects of administration.

On the other hand, I see the majority of web-based and 'app' user interfaces as be­ing essentially badly designed administrative systems. I don't think that the bad design is mainly due to any ineptness or incompetence on the part of the designers. I think it is because the system designers are pressured by those employing them to follow a selfish motive that does not champion the best interests of the cust­om­er, but rather, exclusively, those of the corporate provider.

An example of this, which I again mentioned above, is the use of a fault reporting procedure as an advertising opportunity.

When his Internet connection is down, the user wants to concentrate on resolving the problem so that he can get back on-line as soon as possible. There he is, with increasing exasperation and frustration, battling his way through the impervious hierarchy of menus, on somebody else's computer, trying to find an option that best coincides with his problem. Suddenly, he gets a full colour jazzy picture of a scantily clad girl pushed in his face with "500 MEGA" splayed across her bosom, offering him a higher speed connection plan, when the one he has doesn't even work!

What do the corporate marketers expect his reaction to be? I can only speak for myself, but for me it has an entirely negative effect. When the service I have doesn't even work, why would anybody think I would be open to the idea that the solution would be a faster more expensive connection, which in all probability wouldn't work either! Design the user interface to serve the user as best as possible in the way the user is currently asking to be served.

Consequently, with or without computer savvy on the part of the user, the problem remains. The problem is not technical. The problem for the old, infirm or otherwise challenged is two-fold. It is both physical and cultural. The cultural aspect, however, is essentially linguistic.

The Physical Aspect

A smartphone is too small for me to read the screen or use the stupidly small touch keyboard. Consequently, to make a payment for instance, I have to try to obtain a payment slip with a bar code. This is usually sent by email or as a WhatsApp attach­ment. I do not have the sight or physical dexterity to use a smartphone 'app' to ob­tain a payment slip or make a payment.

If I am able to obtain the payment slip PDF file onto my computer, I can print it im­mediately. But if I am only able to receive it by smartphone, the process is much more complicated. First I need to figure out how to get my smartphone to allow me to transfer the PDF file from its WhatsApp folder to my computer. There seems to be no positive systematic procedure for doing this. It is just a hit and miss situation in which I hope the option to transfer a file by USB will appear in the list of possible operations this time when I swipe downwards from the top of the phone screen. Then I must plug my smartphone's USB cable into my computer and copy the file across to my computer. There I can print the payment slip.

Notwithstanding, it is rarely that the bank's ATM will be able to read the bar code on the printed page. Consequently I need to enter the long string of numbers manually. I cannot see the numbers properly as they are printed in a very long string on the printed sheet. I must therefore copy and paste them into a word processor page, magnify them to 20 point type, set them in manageable rows and print them on the back of my payment slip printout for reading at the bank's ATM in order to enter them. To exacerbate this already complicated situation, it is usually on the fourth or fifth dodgy ATM in the bank hall that I am finally able to make the payment!

If the fact that I have made the payment is disputed by the recipient, I must present an ATM receipt. Otherwise, the law states that I must pay again — implying that my inability to provide a receipt cannot be other than my own fault. Notwithstanding, many times at my local branch of CAIXA ECONOMICA FEDERAL, the ATM does not print a receipt because it's out of paper. But still, by law, it's deemed to be my fault!

Before this ridiculous information technology revolution, all I did was write a cheque and send it by post or give it to the required person. What unprecedented retro­gres­sion from the point of view of users like me since those good old days.

The Linguistical Aspect

Why is it that the young to 40s age-group are tuned in to the way these user inter­faces are designed whereas the older generation are not? In large part, I think it started with the graphics user interface aspect of the Xerox PARC experiment. From what I can glean of this, it seems that they aimed for an icon-based [simple sym­bolic] form of imperative and expression rather than a language-based one. It was essentially built upon the mode of thought of a pre-reading age child rather than on that of a human adult.

I started at my first school when I was 5 years old. I remember that on my first day, all of us new starters were shown where to hang our coats. This was on a long row of pegs along the wall of the entrance corridor. Each coat hook had a little picture next to it. The picture next to my hook was of a door key. That made it easy for me, as a 5-year-old, to remember where to find my coat when it was time to go home. Clearly, a number or my name would not have worked because I was pre-reading age: I thought as a child.

This, apparently, was the basis for the icon-based graphics user interface. It was designed for children — and hence for people who thought as pre-reading age child­ren. The naïve motives for this were 1) simplicity [it was independent of social class and level of education] and 2) it lent itself to easy internationalisation [it was large­ly independent of language]. This system has now become ubiquitous to informa­tion technology throughout the world.

Unfortunately, the psychologists of the Xerox PARC experiment seem to have over­looked a blindingly obvious truth that has been known since antiquity. Even in the Bible, Saint Paul makes quite a forcible glancing reference to it:

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
— 1 Corinthians 13:11

Once a human being acquires language, he does not think any more the way a child thinks. His mode of thought is quite different. Language provides a vastly more powerful and broader mechanism for thought than do the limited mental resources available to the pre-reading age child. It also functions in an entirely different way.

Thus, the reason that the young to 40s are adept with modern website and applica­tion program user interfaces is that they have been inductively re-taught to think like pre-reading age children, whereas the older generation has not. Note the re­sulting endemic short attention-span of the modern young to 40s for reading. Most do not have the capacity to concentrate long enough to read a 3,000 word article. The most they can manage is the little bites provided by a magazine box-ad or TV commercial.

The prime example, in information technology, of this linguistic difference is that between the power and expressibility of a Unix line command and wading endlessly through the hierarchy of frumpy menus in a GUI-based application program to try to get it to do what you want. Of course, the former requires you to learn the comm­and language. However, this is far easier than spending a lifetime battling with im­pervious menus. But it does require the discipline to learn the language initially.

The Xerox PARC type icon/menu based user interface is ideal for very simple tasks. So let's use them for such. However, as the size of a task increases, the necessary complexity of an icon-vocabulary and menu hierarchy takes off exponentially and hence becomes an absolute pain to use. On the other hand, a grammar-based lang­uage continues to handle the enormous complexity of large tasks precisely, con­cisely, accurately and simply. So I'm not advocating that the command line should be the only or even the usual way of using a program. But there should be a com­promise that treats users as adults.

Conflicting Systemic Views

The crux of the problem, however, is that there are two conflicting systemic views to the provision of internet services: namely, a commercial one and a social one.

The commercial view is of a system, which is the Internet itself: a network comp­rising routers and links, which terminates in leaves [the end-users]. The end-user is perceived simply as a processor of logical [ostensibly commercial] transactions. In this view, the end-user exists simply to be ruthlessly gaslighted into believing and doing what large political and commercial hierarchies wish him to believe and do. The commercial view is essentially democratic. It is thus exclusivist, being inter­ested only in providing service to the influential and profitable mainstream major­ity, marginalising and blanking all less profitable minorities, however large or small, similar or differ­ent. It is a mechanistic view. It sees its jurisdiction as machine-like.

The social [or societal] view, on the other hand, is anything but machine-like. It is a system not comprising routers, links and leaves. Rather, it is a fluid [or complex-dynamical] system comprising human individuals, interacting according to universal interpersonal protocols. This gives society more the form and nature of a swirling flock of starlings, a weaving shoal of fish or a gyrating hurricane. It is a fluid net­work. It is the nemesis of hierarchy. Consequently, a universal system of commun­ication for society must follow the fluid model of society itself. Its focal objective must therefore be to provide optimal and seamless access for each and every indiv­idual human component of society. It must facilitate the needs of every citizen.

The Present Mess

I know an 82 year old lady who lives alone. She is well educated. She can read and write, including writing cheques and posting letters. She suffers from episodes of mental illness. But she has no computer or Internet connection, which she would not know how to use anyway. But the local authority now only communicates and issues rates demands on-line. She never sees them. So, infirm and relatively im­mobile as she is, she is hauled into court as an infractor of the law. Sorry, but this positively disgusts me and wells up within me a furious and justified disrespect for law and authority.

I know a 95 year old lady who has a telephone. However, the telephone service pro­vider does not and will not send her paper bills by post any more. So, in order to even become aware of when and what amount she must pay the phone company, she has to call a young friend to look on the phone company's website and write down on a piece of paper how much and how she must pay. Then she has to get somebody else to go to the post office, give the hand-written scrap of paper to the clerk and make the pay­ment. What unprecedented retrogression from the point of view of people like her since the good old days before the technology revolution.

I happened to comment on the above two cases to a 44 year old relative who is an Assistant Public Prosecutor. He admitted to me that he also finds the use of smartphones for financial transactions difficult and nerve-wracking. So not all the young to 40s find the use of the technology, into which society has been railroaded, easy to use.

I myself [being at the time of writing in my 82nd year] find it impossible to read, what was created to be an A4 size document, on a smartphone screen the size of A7 paper. Even on the smartphones that facilitate zooming [which mine doesn't] it is prohibitively awkward to keep on scrolling horizontally to read each line of type.

My dexterity is also well inadequate for me to be able to enter data accurately us­ing a displayed touch keyboard with keys between a 5th and a quarter the size of my finger tips. When sending SMS, WhatsApp or Signal messages, the jibberish that ensues as a result of inadvertently brushing adjacent keys when typing isn't a very serious matter. Notwithstanding, entering even one character wrongly when typing a bank account number or an amount of money can easily become catastrophic. For the user, of course: but not for a bank, government or big business, who naturally absolve themselves of all responsibility for any error resulting from the individual having no other choice but to enter their financial transactions through such a ludicrously small device.

This obsession with the tiny smartphone makes me wonder when all car manufacturers are going to save costs by fitting cars with 3-inch diameter steering wheels, with a clause in the contract of sale rendering it entirely the driver's fault if he loses control and inadvertently steers into a group of school children walking home on the side pavement. And why not do away with the cost of dashboard instruments [speedometer, fuel guage etc.] and display them all on a Bluetooth wrist-watch style device. After all, each industry must keep up with the revolution in technological stup­idity. Why not replace aircraft instrumentation in the same way and fly the plane with a games console joystick? And while they are at it, why not save on paper costs and carbon footprint by changing the universal stan­dard paper size for official documents, letters and reports from A4 to A7. After all, a smartphone screen has roughly the same area as A7 paper.

Banks, through their wide-eyed and legless adoption of Internet technology, are probably the greatest creators of difficulty and danger for their customers. In my own recent experience I was left in an extremely insecure situation: I was blocked from access to my current account, and all my other banking services in the UK, for 105 days. That's just one occurrence.

Prior to that, when I visited Edinburgh in October 2018, I used my UK bank's debit card. This card was unfortunately one that had the proximity capability for paying for purchases. During the fortnight I was in Edinburgh, my debit card was com­pro­mised. I understand that this can happen, not only by hackers accessing the point of sale equipment, but also by a clandestine device brushing sufficiently close to the pocket containing my wallet containing my proximation enabled debit card. Whatever the means, my card became cloned. And long after I had since returned to Brazil, purchases were being made in Edinburgh with the clone of my card.

The bank suspected something and phoned me at home in Brazil. I told them the precise dates and times that I was in the UK [specifically Edinburgh] and the bank removed the charges from my account. I thanked the lady at the bank for her vigil­ence. Notwithstanding, I had not wanted a proximity-enabled card but I had had no option. To me, the marginal 'convenience' of just holding the card close to the point-of-sale device rather than inserting it into a slot is, to my mind, simply not worth the risk of getting the card cloned.

And now, banks are enabling a person to make a proximity payment by placing his smartphone [instead of his debit card] close to the point-of-sale device. The Blue­tooth Low Energy [BLE] technology used for the transfer of data between the smart­phone and the point-of-sale device has an operational range of up to 100 metres. Hackers could gain access to universal [or 'back door'] encryption keys through compromised 'trusted' employees of relevant organisations. Then, from within the 100 meter operational range, a hacker could gain privileged access to all the data within a victim's smartphone and thereby become able to access it via the Internet.

My question is: why invite such risk simply to save inserting a dumb debit card into the slot of a shop's point-of-sale device? It makes no sense.

An International Transfer

In 2004 and 2005 I brought capital from the United Kingdom to Brazil. I in­vested it in a Brazilian bank. I had notions of buying some land for a project. My Brazilian partner fell victim of a devastating land swindle, so we both decided to abandon the project. I kept my money invested. In 2024 I decided to transfer my money back to the United Kingdom. I therefore asked the Brazilian bank to arrange for me to do this. I had kept all original transfer documents to show and thereby prove that my capital originated from the UK and that none of it was acquired in Brazil.

A functionary of the bank told me that I could make international transfers via the bank's smartphone app. I explained that I am unable to make transfers using the smartphone banking application because, being 82 years old, a smartphone is too small for me to use with any degree of confidence or security. The screen is far too small for me to read its content clearly. The keys of the touch pad, being only a quarter the size of my fingertips, make them far too small for me to be able to type in reliably such things as passwords, account numbers and monetary amounts. Of course, these must be entered with 100% accuracy, otherwise any arbitrary amount of my money could end up at some unknown destination. Accidentally touching an adjacent key, as well as the intended one, is essentially unavoidable.

In the past, the bank's website was usable but is now unfamiliar, confusing and it lacks some of its original functionality, which I understand is now only available via the smartphone app, which, of course, I cannot use. I suspect that the website has been undergoing what the IT industry calls "agile development", which means it is being modified piecemeal while running live. In my opinion this is, from the cust­om­er's point of view, a very risky practice, which makes me feel extremely vulnerable.

It is for these reasons that I wanted a functionary of the bank to make the transfer at the bank in my presence. I went to the bank on 06 June 2024 accompanied by my brother-in-law, a retired bank manager. My bank manager would not see us, saying that we needed to make an appointment. He later phoned me saying that I should call him back in July and he would make the transfer over the phone. I felt that doing such a thing over the phone was too complicated and could be very risky. Numbers and codes may not be transcribed correctly. Also, I would have to show my latest tax return to the bank's Câmbio department, before they would conduct an international transfer. It is for this reason that I requested a face-to-face meeting with the manager to make the transfer of my money back to the UK.

As evinced by what I have seen published on the internet and in the press, the pres­sure from banks to force people over to using smartphones to conduct banking trans­actions and make payments, plus the wholesale closure of bank branches, is relegating the old, infirm and inept to a state of digital exclusion. I now certainly feel digitally excluded as far as banking is concerned.

I am aware of the advantage for banks. It must greatly and increasingly reduce the need for human functionaries. I expect it also helps cut out ageing less profitable clients, thereby slimming their market down to the younger fast-moving more pro­fit­able segment. This, of course, is standard business practice. Notwithstanding, from a social point of view, it necessitates that the old, infirm and inept will event­ually have to find some means to circumvent the banking system to buy their needs of life. Not all, including me, will be able to find a younger person to do their smart­phone banking for them. Without smartphone access, I am unable to apply and retrieve my money in investment products by myself, which is a further reason for it being expedient for me to return my money to the UK at this time.

I sent a message to the manager via WhatsApp that I would come to the bank to meet with him at 10h00 on Monday 15 July 2024 and that, if this be inconvenient, he should please telephone me to arrange an alternative date and time. I would bring with me the original documents that prove the money in my account origin­ated from the UK, not Brazil. The manager didn't reply. The day before the meeting I sent another message. He said he couldn't see me on the date arranged and made it the following day, to which I agreed. On the day, the process of trans­ferring all my money back to the UK and zeroing my Brazilian account took about 2 hours but eventually the money was transferred. The charges for doing all this were very low, which was nice.

Forced to Use Smartphone

Increasingly, banks no longer send paper statements. You have to look on-line. And they're tending to push the use of smartphone apps, discouraging and marginalis­ing the computer-based Internet banking option. I am forced, aided by my trusty magnifying glass, to squint at my tiny smartphone to check my current transaction trail and balance. I dare not enable payment by smartphone. I could never reliably and accurately enter monetary amounts or account numbers via the tiny keyboard. So many tails of people mistyping and jetting who knows how much of their money to some erroneous and unknown destination.

But the inevitable has happened. Every year, I must complete a tax-return both for myself and my wife. My wife cannot complete her own tax return because she has advanced stage Alzheimer's disease. So, each year, I download and install the gov­ernment tax-return program into my computer. I have absolutely no trouble at all with this PC-based program.

Notwithstanding, I discovered to my horror that, for my 2025 tax-return, I had no way, other than via a smartphone app, of obtaining the necessary tax information from both of the two banks where I have accounts. I knew that Santander no longer provided this information via its website. However, I thought that Bradesco still provided the information this way but I was wrong.

I could journey all the way to the centre of the city and ask, in person at the bank, for a printout of the single A4 sheet of information. But at my age, this is a daunting journey. Before the advent of the smartphone, the bank just sent it by post — once a year! However, this is now too trouble­some and expensive for the bank to do nowadays with the pressure not to incur any 'unnecessary' cost that would deplete shareholder profit.

I tried unsuccessfully to access my Bradesco account via the bank's website. I en­tered my agency [branch] number followed by my account number. Next I was asked to enter the security code generated by the separate little device with which the bank had supplied me. The site did not accept the generated number. It then presented me with an image with distorted letters and numbers that I had to type in. It rejected my entry attempt. I tried a further 5 times but I was rejected every time. I had to give up on the website.

Though, because of my age, I lack the precise vision and dexterity to use such a ridiculously small device, my only other option was to use a smartphone. The banks had finally forced their desired way onto the public, obviously without regard for [less profitable] minorities. I had to go and buy an available smartphone with the largest screen I could find.

I bought a Samsung A25 5G, which had an 'enormous' 6·7 inch screen with a means to enlarge the size of the displayed print. After downloading, installing and opening the banking apps for both Bradesco and Santander, I quickly discovered that with print set to anything larger than the standard size, the banking apps would display only the right-most part of the display and wouldn't scroll sideways. This meant that with enlarged print, I could not see what was on the left-hand side of the screen. So the displayed information was incomplete, which rendered the app essentially use­less. I had to set the print back to standard size and revert to using a powerful mag­nifying glass the way I had had to do on my old LG smartphone.

Under this impediment, I had to go through the rigmarole of signing in and creating a password and a PIN [personal identification number]. Next I was taken to a screen where I was asked to go to a well illuminated place and angle my phone so that my face fitted within an oval border. I was told to take my glasses off, which I did. Then, I couldn't really tell whether my face was positioned correctly or not. So I waited — and waited! Then it dawned on me that the fuzz across the oval might be print. I put my glasses back on. I saw a message telling me to move closer, which I did. My glasses then obviously confused the system because it messaged me that the attempt to take my photograph had failed and that we must try again. I repeated the cycle 5 times then decided that I would simply have to commit the whole process to memory so I could anticipate what the messages across the oval were saying so that I could go through the procedure blind without my glasses. After over half an hour of attempts, the system finally accepted my image. I dread to think whether or not the system will recognise my face in the future or whether I will get locked out, whatever I try to do. Is this what they call technological progress?

This marathon rigmarole was essentially the same for both banks.

The onward route guided me through a labyrinth of product and service sales pages that had absolutely no relevance to the task-in-hand. The confusion this caused was naturally of no help or benefit to me. I expect the numbskull web designers thought of it as exploiting an advertising opportunity. All I can say is that it greatly augment­ed my already negative view of how these banks operate.

Eventually, after blindly clicking my way through the various displays offering me truckloads of apps to download, including games and other irrelevant things, I came by chance to a display with a search bar [I've no idea how I got there]. I entered IRPF [the initials of the tax-return information]. On the Santander site, an image of a lion appeared offering to guide me to the right place to find my year-end tax information. I managed to gen­erate a file containing all my year-end tax information for my bank accounts.

Obviously, even if I could open the file, I couldn't read the PDF file on the stupidly small screen of my new smartphone. I was able to transfer the file produced by Bradesco to my computer via a USB cable. However, for Santander, the process was much more complicated, and, to my mind, far less secure.

With Santander, once the file had been generated, I was presented with options to transfer the file to somebody else's WhatsApp or Signal account. But there was no option for getting the file out of my phone and into my computer, where it would be of some use. Do I believe this? Am I really being constrained to send an unencrypted PDF file containing my personal year-end tax figures through a network to which foreign secret services have a backdoor key to unlock the end-to-end encryption for the spooks to read? Is this what they call security?

So, as if with a gun held to my head, I had no choice. I sent the file to my daughter via Signal and asked her to send it back to me. Fortunately, in addition to its smartphone app, Signal also has a computer app, which I have on my Linux PC. I received the file on my computer's Signal app, copied it to my income tax folder, printed it on A4 paper and deleted it from Signal. So at last, after a full morning's intense and tiring fiddling, I had the information I needed and was able to complete and transmit my tax-return.

Governments and courts seem poised to follow suit with the smartphone as the de facto exclusive means for the public to communicate with them. Thus are the old, infirm and otherwise challenged also poised to become unwitting and unintentional violators of criminal and civil law.

Paying for Internet

I have an Internet connection. It is highly unreliable. Yet the only way I can receive my ISP bill is via email or through the ISPs smartphone 'app'. If a bill arrives during a downtime, I cannot see it so I cannot pay it. So I am fined and have interest added to my next bill. If the downtime persists, the ISP places my name and details on a publicly visible list of bad debtors, upon which event I become a financial per­sona non grata. Sorry, but this positively disgusts me and wells up within me a fur­ious and justified disrespect for law and authority.

My Internet goes down. I need to report the fault. How do I go about doing this? A full laborious, exasperating example of this is reported here.

And so the unending list continues. What callous disrespect by authority and big commerce for a populous minority of people that clearly don't matter. And they ex­pect respect and even deference in return? They probably do.

Non-Inherent Complexity

A corollary, which may be readily drawn from experience of the linguistical aspect of the problem, is that the currently ubiquitous form of user interface embodies a logic that is vastly more complex than the logic that is necessarily inherent to the objective it is designed to achieve.

A prime example is that of making a phone call using a smartphone compared with making a phone call on an old-fashioned landline phone. To make a call on a land­line phone, I simply lift the handset from its hook, dial the number required and wait. Two logical operations. To terminate the call, I simply replace the handset on its hook. One logical operation. The procedure contains no more logical steps than are inherent to the task.

In making the same phone call using my security-protected smartphone, I counted a minimum of 9 separate logical operations. In some cases if I am not quick enough during the procedure, the phone's screen locks up and I must re-enter the unlocking code, which can bring the number of logical operations as high as 13. At times, the only way I have found to break a call is to switch off the phone and later re-boot it. Technical progress? I think not.

All this drastically diminishes the usability of a device or web interface by the old, infirm or inept. But these are all supposedly equal citizens, for whom a public com­munications facility, deemed essential to the practice of citizenship, must cater.

Further Instances

Digital Exclusion is not just limited to the Internet. One instance that is not is the bus pass. I visited Edinburgh as a tourist. I, with two other people, were staying in Leith Walk. We wanted to visit a place called Portobello about 7 km from where we were.

We got on a bus. We had debit cards. The bus company would not accept payment by card. We were supposed to have a bus card. When we asked where to get one, we were told we would have to walk to the city centre and buy them there. That was about 1½ km in the other direction. I am 82. That would not be easy for me. The only other option was to pay by cash. We only had cash for emergency and the smallest we had between us was a £50 note. We asked the driver if he had change. He said they didn't give change. Since we were on holiday, I decided to pay the £50. A return ticket for the 7 km journey was issued.

When we later got on the bus to return to Leith Walk, the driver said that our ticket was not valid for some reason that none of us could understand. I explained that we had paid £50 for a return trip of 7 + 7 km. The driver said that she shouldn't really allow us on the bus but that under the circumstances would condescend to let us take the return journey.

LESSON: The bus in Edinburgh is for locals only: definitely not for tour­ists, especially old age tourists. The taxi fare is listed as about £12.

In April 2024, I visited Quebec City. I was staying in Boulevard Pie-XII. I wanted to take a bus to visit the Citadelle of Quebec about 12 km distant. I walked to the bus stop and got on a bus. I was told I could not use the bus because I needed a bus card. I asked where I could get a bus card. I had to walk 300 metres to a shopping mall and buy a rechargeable bus card. Even though I'm 82, it was for me compl­icated but doable, although far less convenient than just getting on the bus and paying by cash or debit card. But I have no choice but to accept this inevitable retrogression imposed by technology.

The other great digital excluder is Uber. I can call a taxi by phone or I can walk to the nearest taxi-point. To use Uber, I need to be able to use an app on a smart­phone, which I find difficult to impossible and in any case vastly over-complicated. If I pay in cash, I need exactly the correct amount of the fare because, in my exper­ience, the drivers don't have change. So the young to middle-life salaried earners pay less: the old, infirm and inept pay more. But that's the way of capitalism.

Digital Exclusion from Air Travel

In April 2024, I travelled from my home in Belo Horizonte-MG in Brazil to Quebec City in Canada. I went there to see my grandchildren for the first time. I booked the whole journey through Air Canada. At my age, this journey could never have been other than quite a challenge anyway. However, with the significant degradation in the provision of essential en-route information by airlines over the past decade or so, this journey proved to be extremely exhausting and stressful. Certainly not the pleasure air travel used to be.

The culprit, of course, is the irresponsible implementation of new technology. Today, to be able to have a trouble-free journey, the passenger has to have, and be able to use, a smartphone. Without a smartphone, the passenger is effectively blind.

The first leg of my journey was from Belo Horizonte to São Paulo. I had no trouble at all booking in and submitting my baggage at CNF [Belo Horizonte's main air­port].

However, the booking clerk gave me wrong information, saying I must collect my baggage at Toronto to pass through Canadian customs there before re-submitting it and boarding my onward flight to Quebec City.

Happily, the signs at CNF airport were clear. Directions were positively indicated. I went through the security check to 'air side' and boarded my flight on an Embraer E190 [an aircraft I like very much and in which I feel safe] to GRU in São Paulo.

For me, Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo is a perfect nightmare. I avoid it like the plague. I only use it for flights to North America because there's no alter­native. Whenever I go to Europe, I take the TAP flight directly from Belo Horizonte to Lisbon.

The routes through Guarulhos International Airport to transition to onward flights is complicated, confusing, badly signed and leaves the unfamiliar passenger subject to being be­guiled by jobbing transport touts who charge for doing what the free air­port shuttle bus does. To get to my onward connection, I had to go ask at the Federal Police office. The guy was very polite and took the trouble to explain in detail. But getting there was still complicated, time-consuming and stressful.

At GRU, my baggage passed straight through to the onward flight, without my inter­vention. The passport check was problematic and took a very long time. The que­ues of fuming irate people waiting to pass through the gates manned by the Federal Police created a very tense atmosphere. The problem was that the new chip-based passports had to be verified as having a corresponding Canadian eTA [electronic Travel Authorization]. I had the printout of the email sent by the Can­adian govern­ment department to verify, on paper, that I had a valid eTA. But the Brazilian Polícia Federal ignored it. The officer had to leave his post, go off somewhere for about 20 minutes to contact Canada to check that my passport had an eTA. Yet another prob­lem with new technology.

The security check by the Federal Police was thorough, a little incommodating but acceptably systematic. I boarded the Boeing Dreamliner, which I found overly cram­ped, especially bearing in mind my age. The 9 hour flight was, for me boring. I tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Eventually we landed at Toronto.

Toronto airport was an even worse nightmare than São Paulo. This was entirely due to a dearth of information about what I was supposed to do and where I was sup­posed to go to pass through to my connecting flight. I went, along with everybody else who had arrived on my flight, through the immigration check.

There I was confronted by a room full of computer-like machines with touch screens. I went to a machine and it asked me to lay my passport to be scanned. This I did. Then it asked me to do the same for the next person's passport. I was alone. How­ever, there was no logical route provided to get out of the necessity to scan another passport. So I laid my passport on the scanner again. The machine displayed a mes­sage saying that there was an error because the passport had already been scan­ned. I looked for an escape key or displayed button. But there wasn't one. I could not find any way of getting out of the current display.

Then I saw a human. He was at the entrance to a banded off queuing corridor that led to glass cubicles containing other official looking humans. I told the first human that I simply could not work out how to use those machines. My complaint didn't seem to surprise him and he politely directed me to the glass cubicles. The human in the cubicle asked me why I was visiting Canada, if I was bringing any of a list of controlled items with me, stamped my passport and directed me onwards. I thought this was just the usual immigration passport check. I was later to learn that it had been more than this.

I had been told by the booking clerk in Belo Horizonte that I must reclaim my baggage at Toronto [my first port of entry to Canada]. This is what I had had to do the other times I made this trip in 2013 and 2018. So having been unable to find positive information about this anywhere else, I aimed for the carousels. I waited for ages. Bag after bag came through. But not mine. I continued waiting, even after the carousel sign began to indicate a later flight. Eventually I decided to ask at the complaints desk. There I was told that I must rush to my connecting flight because I was late and that I should collect my baggage at Quebec City. This was new to me.

The corridors were a maze. The distance was long. The signalling was sparse. I was rushing as fast as I could. I was desperate and stressed.

To board the flight to Quebec City, I was subjected to the worst and most obnoxious/authoritarian security check ever. I even had to take my boots off, for which I had to sit on the floor in the middle of the walkway while my laptop and other personal effects were whisked by the conveyor belt to the end of its travel where they were in danger of falling into the mechanism, which, the officers emphatically warned me, would undoubtedly damage them. But I could not get to them until the whole boot rigmarole was completed. Then I passed through the detector while being bel­lowed at to lift my hands above my head. Finally I had to sit down on the floor again and put my boots back on.

When I arrived at the ap­propriate gate for my connecting flight to Quebec City, the gate sign said that the flight had been delayed. Hours went by. Then we were told to move to a different gate. The original aircraft had suffered a technical fault so another aircraft had to be substituted. I arrived in Quebec City where I collected my baggage from the car­ousel and was met by my son and daughter. They had been waiting all morning.

It seems that the passport check in Toronto [where all the incomprehens­ible passport scanning machines were] was also, in effect, a virtual cust­oms baggage check for port of entry; 'virtual' meaning that it took place without the physical baggage having to be reclaimed before the onward flight to Quebec City. A positive change for passenger convenience, but one of which I had had no prior knowledge. Hence my confusion.

Sometime after arriving at my son's house, I switched on my laptop. There were 10 emails from Air Canada waiting for me. They had been sent while I was en-route under the blind assumption that I would, somehow, be able to receive them while travelling. None of these emails contained any advice to the effect that I should only reclaim my baggage at the final destination [contrary to what the functionary at Belo Horizonte had told me].

I suppose they expected me to get my laptop out of my baggage, sit down on the floor amid rushing passengers, open my laptop on my knees, somehow find the airport Wi-Fi and log in to look for emails I had no idea were being sent. Getting into an airport Wi-Fi has, in my past experience been problematic. Some only allow ac­cess to the airport's own web site and those of vendors in the duty-free shops. To gain access to the open Internet, in order to receive emails, generally requires one to go through some kind of registration procedure to obtain an access code.

The alternative is obviously to have, and be young enough to be able to use, a smartphone, which, of course, must have international roaming in order to be able to log in to 4G or 5G Internet service. Perhaps that is what Air Canada expects of its passengers. I did not see any prominent indication in the air ticket document that to fly Air Canada it is mandatory to have, and to be able to use, an internationally en­abled smartphone in order to receive essential en-route information.

Air Canada obviously knew this information long before they even issued my ticket. Consequently, they could have included it in the air ticket doc­u­ment in just one small extra paragraph. Thereby, I could have known all that I needed to do before I even left my house!

Even if I had — and was able to use — a state-of-the-art smartphone, it seems that Air Canada expects me to bear the extra cost of taking on an international roaming service just to be able to receive vital in-transit information by email, on a just-in-time basis. I can see the reason for this. Today's smartphone-toting working-age majority probably don't have the attention span necessary to mindfully read the ticket document in full. I too have trouble with the ticket document but for a differ­ent reason. My difficulty is that it is printed as a mycelium of hair-thin type meand­ering through a blinding expanse of pointless white space, the reading of which is probably a challenge for any elderly person.

I did have my old smartphone with me [which I only use for WhatsApp, Signal and SMS]. However, at Toronto airport, I did not know the network name of the airport Wi-Fi and none of the services I could see displayed on my smartphone were open [not password locked].

Having spent a fortnight with my son and his family and my daughter [who had flown from Edinburgh], I started my journey home to Belo Horizonte-MG in Brazil. My return route was, however, from Quebec City via Montreal and São Paulo. On the first leg of the journey, I suffered a very long delay because of aircraft problems. I eventually arrived in Montreal and caught the sardine crush plane to São Paulo.

During the long-haul flight to São Paulo, my concerns began to rise. I had no idea whether the customs procedure had changed for the whole flight or not. I had asked the check-in clerk at Quebec City whether I had to collect my baggage for customs clearance at São Paulo or at my final destination, namely, Belo Horizonte. She said I should reclaim my baggage at my final destination. But somehow, I had my doubts.

Finally, upon reaching São Paulo, I had decided that the system must have changed and that I should collect my baggage at Belo Horizonte. Notwithstanding, by pure luck, I passed a desk of the Polícia Federal, where three uniformed women were chatting to each other. I asked them where I needed to reclaim my baggage to pass through the Brazilian customs [alfândega]. They said I needed to reclaim my bag­gage right there in São Paulo and submit my baggage again for my onward internal flight to Belo Horizonte. So this I did. If I hadn't, my baggage would have been con­fiscated at São Paulo and would not have been forwarded to Belo Horizonte. Thus, like the check-in clerk at Belo Horizonte, the check-in clerk at Quebec City had also given me wrong information. A very close call indeed.

After the long convoluted walk from [international] Terminal 3 to [internal] Terminal 1, I booked in for the final leg of my journey from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte. I had almost an hour to spare.

However, on reaching the check-in desk, I found that I had been removed from the original flight at 10h25 and booked on to a much later flight at 15h40. Thus, as an 81 year old streaming with flu that I had picked up in Canada, I had to wait an ad­ditional 5 hours and 15 minutes in a small air-side gate area. It appeared that a football team had been booked on the flight I was originally booked on. Obviously, the airline would want to give every possible convenience to important cust­omers, relegating an ill and highly fatigued 81 year old to this excruciating wait.

When my plane finally left, I was happy to be on my way in my favourite Embraer E190 aircraft. The chief flight attendant chatted to me in this half empty flight. I arr­ived at CNF airport Belo Horizonte, reclaimed my baggage and took a taxi home. I was dog tired and still streaming with flu.

After arriving home I found a further 8 emails, sent while I was in transit, one of which told me that I had to collect my baggage at São Paulo to go through customs there. Obviously, I had had no means of receiving it, so the advice was useless. The air­line must have known this information when I first bought the flight. Why didn't they tell me then in the ticket document instead of waiting until I was in transit on the return flight? They could even have told me when I arrived in Canada before the flight home. But no: they had to blindly assume that I could receive emails whilst in transit, which, of course, I couldn't.

Never again!! The message is clear. The old, deficient, infirm, and inept are not sup­posed to travel by air. The airline can prune them out as relatively unprofitable slow movers, optimising the profile of its service to fit the desires and conveniences of the more profitable smartphone-toting working-age majority in order to maximise revenue and shareholder dividends. The airline is obviously unconcerned with the fact that air travel is now an essential part of the domestic and international econ­omic infrastructure. And that, for this reason, the air travel services must of neces­sity include a vital element of social responsibility — towards the whole of society, including the old, deficient, infirm, and inept.

Being unable to use a smartphone because of its ridiculously small size is the only impediment I have because of my age. Consequently, I cannot expect to travel by air without an unacceptable level of risk and stress. Perhaps I am not supposed to travel by air without a younger person with a smartphone, even though I am phys­ically fit and well capable of getting my self to where I need to go [provided of course that I have the correct information as to where to go].

All this sends a clear signal to me that perhaps it's time I wasn't here. It makes me think that perhaps I should long ago have been placed on the carousel depicted in the film Logan's Run (1976).

Legal Implications of Digital Exclusion

Probably the most progressive country, as regards The Law of the Internet, is Brazil. Unlike most countries, its law, as regards the Internet, is not expressed as a set of restrictions and prohibitions. On the contrary, it is formulated as a citizens' Internet Bill of Rights [O Marco Civil da Internet — LEI Nº 12.965, DE 23 DE ABRIL DE 2014].

There are millions of people in Brazil who are exceedingly poor. On the other hand, the dominant elements of modern society have engineered it such that for the in­dividual now to be able to meet his minimum necessary and sufficient obligations and exercise his basic rights, he must have an Internet connection.

Internet Bill of Rights: Chapter II: Users' Rights and Guarantees:
Art. 7º Internet access is essential to the exercise of citizenship, ...

Consequently, it must be incumbent upon society to make adequate and effective bona fide Internet access either free or comfortably affordable by the poorest. And from what I see, this is definitely their legislators' devout intent, which I applaud.

On the other hand, while its law is very positive and progressive as regards the Internet, the way in which Brazil has implemented Internet services both technically and commercially is, in my opinion, very much the opposite. It has gone in wide-eyed and legless with the rapid adoption of new technology, burning its bridges [the old established ways] as it goes, without giving thought to the ramifications or col­lateral consequences of what it is doing. The result has been, from what I can see, that many minorities, through no fault of their own, have been caught between a rock and a hard place, as regards meeting their civil and financial obligations.

For example, during the Covid 19 pandemic, TV news was full of grievous warnings, especially to the old, that everybody should stay in doors and under no circumstances venture out in public places, especially queues such as at banks. On the other hand, I had to pay my utility and condo­minium charges under threat of having my name placed on a national bad debtors list that was publicly visible on the web, and be subsequently prosecuted for non-payment.

The institutions concerned do not accept cash or cheques sent by post any more. I cannot use a smartphone to pay, so I had to risk my life by walking the one kilometre to the bank [and one kilometre back after­wards] whatever the weather or my state of health, then queue up at the bank in a crush of other masked people to use an ATM with all the in­cumbent dangers of an elderly person catching Covid 19. Clearly, in the eyes of government and commerce, money takes precedence over life. I still have to walk that 2 km round trip every time I need to pay a bill [which is not easy for an 82-year-old] while the young 40-somethings just point their smartphones at the bill and pay it at home!

While the technical provision of Internet access in Brazil leaves a lot to be desired, the major problems lie with administrative and commercial presentation. Rather than being designed to provide self-evident functionality and ease of use by the en­tire range of education levels and aptitudes among the general public, commercial web sites are obviously designed primarily to provide advertising opportunities for the site owner. As such, their glitzy page content is psychologically designed to con­stantly tug the user's attention away from the task he came there to do, pressuring him into upgrading his service plan or buying a product he doesn't want. This uni­versal practice is not only very disruptive and mentally fatiguing for the user, but is also very dangerous for him, especially in the case where the user entered a bank website to conduct a financial transaction.

Even official government websites seem to think they have to follow an arty-farty presentation style in order to project what is seen as a 'professional' image. For ex­ample, look at the mycelium lines of microscopic print set in acres of white-space in the present­ation of O Marco Civil da Internet. In order to be able to study this law comfortably, I had to copy and paste it into a word processor and change the type-size, typeface and format to suit my preference.

The 'provision of Internet access' necessarily mandates a qualifying specification of the 'target user base' to whom it must be 'provided'. And since it is declared to be essential to the 'exercise of citizenship', the user base concerned must necessarily be 'all citizens'. The universal set of 'all citizens' includes the rich, the poor, the young, the mid-aged, the old, the infirm, the deficient and the inept. And doubtless many other categories besides. Consequently, Internet access must be provided through a channel that is adequately and comfortably accessible to all of these.

Notwithstanding, at the time of writing, this is definitely not the case. Many web­sites, including those of many banks, can only be adequately used via one mark of proprietary web browser. This is because the site's web design programmers have used proprietary extensions to the standard JavaScript language that will only func­tion within the proprietary browser they have decided upon. Some of the function­ality of their web page won't work in other browsers. A prime example I have come across on my bank's website is that the chat facility, which is the only direct means of communicating with the bank, will now only work in one type of browser.

It is well established mandatary practice on any public-facing web service that only standard RFC functionality, that is universal throughout the IT industry, must be used. Nothing that's exclusive to just one manufacturer.

Yet what, in my opinion, is by far the greatest act of technological irresponsibility in the provision of Internet access to the general public is the painfully obvious pres­sure from government, industry and commerce towards forcing the smart­phone to become the de facto device for Internet access. Indeed even now, my bank only makes all its Internet functionality available through its smartphone app, having cut some user-essentials from its browser-based website.

This excludes a significant portion of the members of five of the eight categories of 'citizen' that I mentioned above. Thus, with the smartphone as the de facto device through which Internet access is provided, a significant portion of the poor, the old, the deficient, the infirm and the inept will be wholly or partly excluded from Internet access just because of the limitations imposed by the device's plain physical size.

Since this significant portion of the poor, the old, the deficient, the infirm and the inept are excluded from what the law has determined to be essential to the practice of citizenship, then these people are ipso facto not 'citizens'. Thus deprived of the ability to practice citizenship, they cannot be expected to pay taxes, utility bills, con­dominium charges, the costs of their basic needs of life [to which they have the right as granted under Article 3 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948] or be subject to any other form of financial or civil obligation. Hence they must be legally exempt from such obligations of citizenry.

Unlike Brazil, most, if not all, other countries do not have an Internet Bill of Rights. Consequently, their poor, their old, their deficient, their infirm and their inept have no recourse against digital exclusion. For these hapless humans, the law does not enforce social responsibility upon the provision of Internet access, which is primarily driven by government convenience and commercial expedience.

To me it is self-evident that it is not morally acceptable to exclude some of the in­habitants of a country from citizenship just because of a mere technological issue. I therefore hold the opinion that society must be obliged to provide all the country's inhabitants with a user interface that can provide Internet access that is physically and logically adequate for everybody to use for its declared purposes.

The Anatomy of Digital Exclusion

A national population is not a homogeneous set of generic human beings. It comprises different types of people. The categories into which different types of people fall depends on the purpose for which they are being cat­egorised. For the purpose of digital inclusion, the population must be categorised accord­ing to their respective aptitudes for being able to use the available means of accessing Internet services. The different categories of people within the population will have differ­ent levels of ease and challenge in using the available means of access. The relative sizes of the categories shown don't pertain to any particular country but are merely a general illustration. The proportion of the Old sector is growing rapidly.

The working-age majority is naturally the most apt at using Internet services. They have sufficient maturity, knowledge and intelligence to be able to use the means through which Internet services are provided. They have eyesight good enough to read the display screens and sufficient dexterity to be able to enter information into most available Internet access devices. They are thus able to meet their civil and financial obligations as citizens of their country via the Internet, which commercial and government pressure is increasingly making the only reasonable and workable means of so doing.

The young have the eye sight to see clearly the small screen of the ubiquitous smartphone. They also have the dexterity to manipulate and control it. However, unlike all other categories, they are completely free to take it or leave it. They are not required by law to use it in order to meet their legal and social obligations, although a young person could well find himself excluded from his natural peer group if he doesn't have one.

The eyesight and dexterity of the elderly diminishes with age at an accelerating pace. They can also suffer from growing dementia and diminishing mental dexterity. They are charged, nonetheless, with exactly the same obligations as the working-age majority to fulfil their civil and financial duties as citizens, which increasingly can only be expedited reasonably and practically via the physically and logically restrictive devices through which they are constrained to access the Internet. With­out the help of younger family members, which of course many do not have, most of the elderly find this extremely difficult or even impossible. They are caught bet­ween a rock and a hard place. I have even heard perfectly healthy people in their 40s complain of having the same difficulties!

Then there are, within any population, the deficient, the infirm and the inept, who are young or of working age. Such a person may have inadequate sight for using a smartphone. Yet his sight may be perfectly adequate for everything else in life. Hence, a medic will not diagnose him as having a deficiency. Consequently, he will receive no help or concession from society in fulfilling his civil and commercial ob­li­g­ations for which he must have, and be able to use, Internet services. The same applies for lack of physical dexterity and, especially, mental deficiencies, illnesses and personality disorders. Positively no help, nor even sympathy.

Two things dominate in determining how easy or difficult Internet access will be for each given category of person within the population. These are 1) the form of the physical devices and 2) the design of logical user interfaces, through which Internet access is made available. These two things are themselves determined by the type of operational model through which Internet access is provided. And there are two possible [mutually incompatible] operational models, which I shall refer to as, the Business/Democratic model and the Social/Humanitarian model.

Business/Democratic Model

This is the model under which Internet services are currently provided in the greater part of the world today — especially in the West. It is based squarely on the corpor­ate precept of maximising shareholder dividends by maximising profit — by maxi­mis­ing revenue and minimising costs.

Part of the modus operandi of maximising revenue and minimising costs is to cut out dead wood [products that 'stay on the shelf' too long or are otherwise less profitable than most] and concentrate on the fast movers [the most bought prod­ucts that are delivered 'just-in-time' and sold very shortly after they arrive].

To apply this modus operandi to the provision of Internet access services, the great Internet service providers do the following:

They concentrate on selling to the working age majority that has money and will passively opt for one of the vendor's highly promoted packages [venda casada (a married sale)] comprising a high-speed data connection plus TV & film streaming, big-store discount cards and other things. This is their fast-moving/high-revenue/high-profit market sector.

Meanwhile, they try to prune out the far less profitable and much more costly act­ivity of selling simple low-speed Internet connections without added services, which are mainly sought by the poor, the elderly, the deficient, the infirm and the inept. Service providers do not promote such options. In fact, they seem to proactively discourage one's efforts to find these simple services by making it next to impos­sible to navigate the convoluted and obstructive path to where information about them may be hidden in some dark corner of their websites.

Notwithstanding, the refusal to supply a simple connection to a customer [or even saying that such is unavailable] is illegal under Article 39 of the Consumer Protec­tion Code.

LEI Nº 8.078, DE 11 DE SETEMBRO DE 1990
Dos Direitos do Consumidor: Art. 39.
É vedado ao fornecedor de produtos ou serviços, dentre outras práticas abusivas: (Redação dada pela Lei nº 8.884, de 11.6.1994)
I - condicionar o fornecimento de produto ou de serviço ao fornecimento de outro produto ou serviço, bem como, sem justa causa, a limites quant­itativos;

The rights of The Consumer: Art. 39.
Suppliers of products or services are prohibited from, among other abus­ive practices:
I - making the supply of a product or service conditional on the supply of another product or service, as well as, without just cause, on quantitative limits;

In other words, the consumer is not legally obliged to buy a complete 'combo' pack­age if he only wants a simple Internet connection. He does not have to buy his Internet connection packaged with TV & film streaming and store discount cards and whatever else. Neither can the consumer be obliged to buy more than one instance of anything if he doesn't want to do so.

I am, myself, a victim of a pressured 'combo-only' sale by Claro of an Internet access service, which mandatorily included TV and film stream­ing and roaming Wi-Fi; none of which even work! But having had to fight Claro for 3 solid months just to get my basic connection's domestic-level listening ports open, I didn't have the mental energy to enter into another long fight to get the non-working additions removed from my contract.

The service provider is legally obliged to provide a simple Internet con­nection, if requested to do so. The problem is that members of this market sector — the poor, the elderly, the deficient, the infirm and the inept — are unlikely to have the means and know-how to invoke and enforce Article 39 of the Consumer Protec­tion Code.

The young, of course, are not service buyers. Service providers therefore promote services to the young to influence the young to pester their working age parents to buy services aimed at the young. In this regard, the young can be thought of as part of the working-age market sector.

So far in this discourse about the business/democratic model of Internet service provision, I have dealt only with providers of Internet access. But Internet service providers also include those who provide informative, commercial, government and entertainment services via the Internet. This they do mainly through websites or smartphone apps.

But because these other Internet service providers also adhere to what I have called the business/democratic model, their websites and apps are complicated, arty-farty, dazzling and difficult to use. The logic of the procedures for using them is unavoidably vastly more complicated and convoluted than the logic that is in­herent to the task that the user is trying to get done.

Furthermore, there is much pressure, from service providers, to force users off web-based sites onto smartphone apps. My bank has already removed some facilities from its website, making it available only via their app; thus forcing me to make a journey of several kilometres to the bank in order to get, for example, a year-end tax statement. The bank won't send one by post any more.

The small screen of the smartphone, with its microscopic print and touch keyboard with keys only a fraction of the size of a human fingertip, make the smartphone im­possible to use by most of the sector of the population comprising the old, deficient, infirm and inept.

In any case, even on websites, such as the one showing all government laws, the print is nearly always a thin mycelium within acres of white-space, which is impossi­ble to read. In order to read a law, I have to copy the content into a word processor to reformat it into a readable presentation. What a needless chore! All, I suppose, in the interest of arty-fartyness.

In all this, the Internet service providers uphold the democratic prerogative by giving the dominant majority what they can persuade it to want, while excluding — or, at least, marginalising — non-conforming minorities. A divisive modus operandi that treats those that matter differently from those that don't. In other words, it follows the inevitable path of the democratic process: the majority gets what it has been persuaded to want, relegating the hapless minorities to go eat shit. The result is the present exploitative relationship of adversarial distrust between the provider and the poor, elderly, infirm, deficient and inept consumers of Internet services.

Social/Humanitarian Model

The objective of the Internet is to link all end-users by means of a network. A net­work is, by its fundamental nature, not a hierarchy. Systemically, end users are equals. They do not have military-style ranks; stated or implied. They are not under any form of command and control. Neither is the engineering form of the infra­struc­ture of routers by way of which they communicate. The element of the Internet to which an end-user is directly connected is, logically speaking, an edge-router. The edge-router to end-user connection should therefore be the same for everybody. This makes all end-users equal peers who communicate according to what is effect­ively a protocol of good manners.

In fact, the relationship between end-users [both service providers and service consumers] is, in principle, that of the Ethernet protocol as used in local area networks. If machines can do it, why can't people do it?

This is the model according to which, in my opinion, Internet services ought to be provided. It is definitely not predicated upon the corporate precept of maximising shareholder div­idends by maximising corporate profit. It is based firmly on meeting the needs and preferences of the generic user — the consumer.

I use the adjective generic not to signify 'average' or 'norm', but instead to signify 'composite'. It is all the needs and preferences of all the people mapped on to a single individual. Thus, if Internet access and services meet the needs of this hypo­thetical individual, then any given individual within the population can use those means of access and the services he needs or desires without difficulty — whether he be rich, poor, young, middle-aged, old, infirm, deficient or inept.

This requires research and design, with all categories of the population being in­volved and consulted. It needs a robust universal access device to which ancillary devices can be readily attached and configured by any user to meet the special needs of the old, infirm, deficient or inept.

Websites must be designed to enable the user to carry out his task-in-hand accord­ing to a simple procedure whose logical complexity is no more than that inherent to what he is doing. In other words: websites must not be designed to be primarily corporate advertising opportunities during which the user is railroaded through an obstacle course through which his attention is constantly being diverted from his task-in-hand and dazzled into making impulsive purchases that he will later regret.

All the functionality that the individual citizen needs on the Internet has been there from the beginning. The Open Source 'Internet Relay Chat' was there as a free and open facility long before corporate steamrollers like Skype, Twitter, WhatsApp and Signal were ever thought of. I haven't mentioned the earlier ones. I can't even rem­ember their names. Web servers were there from the beginning long before social media like Facebook, Reddit etc.. All such facilities, such as a personal/family web­server and mailbox, could be easily incorporated into the consumer access device.

Although user access devices could include search spiders, I think that the search engine is the one facility that needs to exist as a universal service. Notwithstanding, it needs to be the old fashioned search engine: not what has replaced them, which is what I see as a censoring engine.

I am not proposing that the smartphone should be done away with. I am saying that the possibility of it becoming the de facto or even the exclusive device for some or all Internet services or functions must be prohibited through strong legislation. Else, the smartphone will become [in fact currently is] an instrument of digital exclusion. Furthermore, the smartphone is a very tenuous and insecure device to contain personal information and access to financial facilities. A smartphone is easily lost or stolen. In Brazil, smartphones are stolen [frequently at gun-point] at the rate of 1680 per hour.

NOTE: this figure is derived from population poll surveys and includes the majority unreported thefts. Officially reported cellphone thefts are only 107 per hour. Most don't file an official report [boletim de ocorrência].

To this end, I think that any Internet Bill of Rights [such as the Brazilian Marco Civil da Internet] should specify that Internet access devices must be available to cater for everybody within the population — of all age-ranges and challenges — such that they be digitally included and hence full and equal citizens. Nobody should be forced to rely on their smartphone as the only means of Internet access.

I think that this Social/Humanitarian model is the best and correct model for the provision of Internet access and services. But this is not a socialist model pitched against a business model. For me, it isn't a political issue: it is a systemic consider­ation: a matter of engineering necessity.

Notwithstanding, this model would undoubtedly present a real and present threat to Western democracy. It would give all individuals the independent means to search all available information and knowledge, learn to discern truth from fake, draw con­clusions from a broad base about what is and what could be, then form valid opin­ions about the world in which they live.

The problem is that this would give them a clear vision of what an unjust poverty-ridden disparate society they live in. This could ignite social insurrection and even armed revolution. It would herald the certain demise of the present socioeconomic hierarchies upon which the privileged elites are perched. It would make people more equal, lifting the quality of life of all human beings above the thres­hold of acceptability. And that would never do!

Consequently, to make sure this doesn't happen today, the big corporate Internet service channels keep the consumer harmlessly occupied and mindlessly tranquil­lised on trivia such as streamed soap operas, films and football plus idle banter on corporate social media, thereby keeping them diverted from any cogent thinking about the dog-pile world in which they live.

In the beginning, the Internet was designed, constructed and operated according to what I have described as the Social/Humanitarian Model, except that its "society" was not so much the general public, but was rather a "public" made up of academic and government institutions worldwide. Its modus operandi in those days was, nonetheless, based on a kind of "equal peer" principle. The Internet thus well ful­filled its design role of providing an efficient worldwide means for the free and un­encumbered distribution of knowledge and information.

But as commerce began to invade the Internet, its whole modus operandi started to change from the Social/Humanitarian Model to the Business/Democratic Model. I re­member the buzz phrase for this change that was banded about in the IT press at the time: to change the Internet into a business tool, we must "turn pull into push".

In this context "pull" referred to the fact that an Internet user used a search engine to find what he was looking for and thereby passively "pulled" the information he wanted from its source. And everything was simple, efficient and peaceful.

But businesses wanted to reverse this in order to conform to the modus operandi of commerce. They wanted instead to proactively "push" advertising pressure at the Internet user to promote the sale of their products. Thus was born the sponsored search engine listing and websites designed primarily to be advertising and sales opportunities. Thus the clear, simple informative websites of old were crowded out by the glitzy jazzy adverts of today whose complicated logic is designed to railroad the hapless viewer into making an impulsive purchase.

Sadly, in order to project what they have been induced to think is a 'professional' image, official websites have naively followed suit, thus increasing the difficulty of their use by those they are supposed to be serving.

Programming

As a final somewhat personal concern, how would I program a smartphone? I'm a programmer. So if we are all going to be railroaded by government and commerce into having the smartphone as the de facto — and eventually the only — means of accessing the Internet, how am I, and all others like me, going to write our highly specialised applications to do the specific tasks we need to do?

With a full size PC running Linux, this is all straightforward and easy. But I shudder at the thought of how impossibly complicated it would be to write and compile a 'C' program on a smartphone. Apart from the crippling size problem, would a smart­phone's cut-down proprietary operating system even allow me to install a compiler and write and run a program that has not been approved — at obviously enormous cost to me — by its 'apps store'?

The Solution

The solution to this mess can only be to change the systemic view of Internet ser­vice provision from its current commercial machine-like architecture to a societal complex-dynamical architecture.

And this must be done in two stages:

1. Develop a network technology that mirrors the complex-dynamical nature of human society and draw up a comprehensive plan for implementing it.

2. Make the change from the present machine-like architecture to the new fluidic architecture, without interrupting, diminishing or otherwise impinging on the service received by the customer.

All this is simply the fulfilment of the social obligation to treat others as you would wish them to treat you — whoever they are. In other words: to love your neighbour as yourself.

Conclusion

But this solution will never happen because it is contrary to the interests of those that matter. At the moment, I can still walk the two kilometre round trip to the bank to pay my statutory bills. I can still walk the 1·2 kilometre round trip to the super­market, buy my groceries by debit card and hump them home in my back pack. Although, I must point out that, as an old age pensioner, I must pay the surcharge of exclusion from the store discounts given to users of the supermarket's app.

NOTE: I can still make purchases with my debit card. But for how much longer? How long have I got before the smartphone becomes the one and only means of paying for anything, thereby taking its place as the apo­calyptic Mark of The Beast?

Notwithstanding, I now very much feel the weight of my age. The day is rapidly ap­proaching when I simply will not be physically able to do these things. So, without the vision and dexterity to use a smartphone, I won't be able to pay my local auth­ority taxes, condominium charges and utility bills levied by the soulless bureau­cratic automatons of modern technology, who have no context, consciousness, con­science or care for particular human circumstances.

Consequently, I will be fined and otherwise penalised for non-payment. My water and electricity will be cut off. I will have no water to drink. I will have no food to eat. Thus will I be denied my supposed right to life: a starving but proud outlaw at odds with the pernicious laws of a global society that has lost humanity because of its negligent, irresponsible and inappropriate implementation of new technology.

From capitalist socio-economies, the message could not be clearer. It could not be louder: "If you're too old to drive or do not have the vision or dexterity to use apps on a smartphone then it's time you were gone".