Library hours are limited. Where I live they are open 10am to 9pm. They are closed on Holidays. They are closed when the rather is bad. I checked in Grenoble which I’m slightly familiar with and librarys there are closed on Sundays.

What was the response when you complained? Try city council.

That makes it completely impossible to receive morning schedule changes.

No, it just means you cannot sit in a chair inside the library to get your morning schedule changes. Any wi-fi you traverse in the morning will do the job.

Yes. And what are you doing yo do about it?

I personally use hacker spaces and universities in moments when libraries fail to serve.

Suggest that it should be privatized and deregulated like the Internet so that it magically becomes free?

Libraries are already the right price for me. But if you’re getting fucked on the price, knock yourself out asking for privatization but I can’t see that improving anything. You would still be asking the same people to broaden the operating hours, but they would have to alter a contract.

But you have been arguing against regulating!

No I haven’t. You are really lost here. I never said anything of the kind. By now you should know that I advocate boycotting. Whether you boycott or not has nothing to do with the extent they are regulated.

I guess I should boycott libraries too until they change?

Not sure why you think a boycott affects a public resource. Unlike a private sector boycott, your lack of relationship does not cost the library. You would have to get nearly /everyone/ to boycott the library just to make the case that it should be shut down due to lack of use. You have a better chance of just asking for morning hours, after convincing them that the local university library is also closed in the mornings.

Do you need me to go back and quote you where you repeatedly defended Trump’s deregulation because high speed Internet customers would subsidize cheaper service?

Yes, I do.

“Netneutrality is not going to cause dial-up customers to lose even more performance. If anything, they might even fair better because the ISP will be able to bring in more profits which could increase the effect of subsidy from higher payers.”

Is that the quote you think defends deregulation? Your mother tongue is apparently not English. Nothing in that quote endorses deregulation. It simply supports the claim deregulation harms broadband users but not narrowband users. Harm to either is harm nonetheless.

That was a single example from a link I gave you with dozens of examples from multiple states from 10 years ago.

The only interesting state was Texas because the other states have offline filing, which makes them entirely irrelevant.

It also included states that require online filing for small claims and landlord tenant disputes.

You’ve misunderstood the article. Only Texas has the requirement.

Internet is cheaper than a lawyer.

This is a false dichotomy. You need not choose between the two. If you opt out of the lawyer, free public wi-fi is cheaper than Internet delivered to your home.

Your lawyer does the filing, not you. So no problem if you boycott having Internet at home. If you need to file pro se in Texas, it’s shitty indeed that there is no analog mechanism but at least you have the library. And the court itself probably has machines you can use. Otherwise, there is a human rights issue in Texas if court access is exclusively for people who have property (i.e. PCs).

And people need to receive communications before and after school hours.

And? Are you trying to imply that library hours are a total subset of school hours, making it impossible for students to access libraries? If so, that’d be a quite dysfunctional library system you have.

Many libraries aren’t even open on Sunday.

You have a democracy. Use it. Stop making excuses and demand better.

I have access to an unstaffed library on Sunday. The library card unlocks the door.

That’s not an argument. It is a veiled personal attack.

Nonsense. “Rediculous” is not an argument. You have failed in presenting facts and logic that support your claims. Attempting to claim my ideas are “rediculous” is a baseless ad homenim. Pointing out your lack of sound logic is not.

It is as weird insult for you to use because you have been defending this Trump ruling to deregulate large Internet corporations.

It’s the other way around. You have lost track of the thesis. The boycott opposes Trump’s action and the corps interests. Your opposition to the boycott is the boot licking pro-Trump stance.

It does because they need Internet to receive communication about School for their children.

Not simultaneously. The library operates all day long. Different people have different schedules.

Children’s homework is also online.

Bad idea. But not everyone has kids. Not all kids have homework. Not all homework requires the cloud. Not all homework must be done the same day it is assigned.

The time to build a larger library is measured in years. A timer means the library cannot support everyone but everyone needs the Internet.

I am living proof that all hospitals can be closed. (I haven’t needed to be in a hospital since childhood)

Your argument is ridiculous.

You sound like Trump’s lawyer, who could put together a logical argument, and so was just left with declaring “rediculous”. Can’t pound the law… cannot pound any facts or evidence… so you are left pounding the table.

We are talking about the potential affect of net neutrality on everyone. That you personally can function without it doesn’t mean everyone can.

I am not functioning without Internet. I am using the Internet in a sacrificial way without feeding the infra. I am not streaming movies and using all the convenience frills that pushovers are addicted to.

That needs to be built. The current infrastructure cannot support everyone using the public library.

It only needs to be built if 10k people actually have the will power to boycott. And in that case the affluent users and the poor users are treated equally by the library, unlike the boot-licking action you advocate for where wealthy people can buy their way to superior access from the comfort of their homes.

It’s not will power when it is required by schools and the government.

Citation needed on the government mandate that you have Internet installed in your home. It’s will power because access from your sofa and home office is a matter of convenience.

The total infrastructure support for 1,000 simultaneous people in a library that was only built for 100 is far greater than that.

It’s not simultaneous. 1000 people boycotting does not mean they all leave their homes and enter the library at the same time. Libraries are scalable (not limited to 100). They control the upper limit of the scale as well with timers.

And it doesn’t fix the problem that communication via Internet is required. You can’t live at the library.

Works for me. I am living proof that occasional Internet access from the library is possible.

Again that is a side effect. If reddit paid tier ones to block Lemmy, they now can.

They cannot. You’re again fixated on what’s legally possible, not how the market works. Reddit could not pay tier 1’s enough money to block Lemmy and offset the market consequences of that move.

I’m focused on tier 1 because that’s what actually matters. They are the ones who fought net neutrality.

That’s a false cause fallacy. Comcast fought net neutrality because for their retail business, not tier 1 business.

56k is a side effect, not the target.

Exactly. It’s not the target. As I said, you cannot market a dial-up connection that is artificially crippled. And you cannot cripple the speeds across the board enough to affect 56k connections.

Stop saying that when we’ve already proven it’s impossible because of government/school communication.

Nonsense. I am proof that boycotting is viable. I am living by the boycott. I can communicate with my gov just fine. I also communicate with researchers at universities just fine without paying Internet subscriptions and without using other institutions bandwidth that was not oversold.

Consolidation reduces the work up to the limit of existing infrastructure. You can litter without affect.

Indeed.

Everyone littering means more cleaners are needed.

The already exposed brokeness of your analogy continues to escape you. As already pointed out, the analogy is inaccurate if you assume no one litters to begin with. Everyone is already using the Internet. They would be effectively be moving their litter from being scattered to consolidated. The same litter in one place reduces the amount of infra needed, not increases. There is no longer a need to maintain all those comms lines citywide if no one uses them.

It’s why a festival requires far more clean up than regular service.

It’s far less effort.

We’ve already covered this.

Yes we have. How can you still fail to grasp this? 2-4 people cleanup after a festival in <2 hours. That same litter scattered citywide needs a staff of hundreds working days. It’s not even close. As I already established, you’re off by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

It’s why you can use the library, but it isn’t an option if all 10,000 people in a village needed to use it at the same time.

If you cannot support a network for 10k people in a small place, it’s a failure of your competency, not physics. A “library” need not be a single building. 10k people would be using a combination of libraries and campuses, in the unlikely event that you manage to find 10k people with the will power to boycott. You are well in the realm of pure fantasy at this point because Americans would have no hope of escaping their own intolerance for inconvenience on that scale. You simply will not find 10k people in any given city with the will power to boycott anything at all, much less something that serves as a daily convenience. But if you do, you’re limited only by your competence.

Which is beside the point that families with children living at the library isn’t an option. Schools communicate through the Internet.

There is nothing that stops students from using libraries and gov buildings. No one needs to “live” at a library.

You admitted that everyone using the library would increase costs to the library.

Your math and memory are both failing you. I said: “They lose my subscription fee but the library does not have to pay the difference in excess of their costs.”

That’s the same for everyone. If 1000 people cancel their $40/month subscriptions and go to the library, the library costs do not increase by $40,000/month to offset the loss, even if you forgot that library consumption per person is less than always-online domestic usage per person.

W.r.t your memory failure, I said I alone do not increase the library costs. Conflating /myself/ with /everyone/ neglects the math above.

You don’t understand how the Internet works.

The ability for intermediary networks to interfere with Internet traffic isn’t bogus. That is why the FSF has and is fighting for it.

FSF is not in the slightest worried about Lemmy being throttled below 56k. If they were, it would indicate inability to understand how business works. FSF is fighting for reasons you don’t understand if you think the concern is throttling Lemmy below analog modem speeds.

Companies do not act as idealized politically neutral agents. For example right wing media has distorted news reporting because it is what the owner wants despite the loss in profit from alienating part of their customers.

You should really avoid analogies.

A tier 1 network can now restrict content both for profit (a competitor pays the tier 1’s to shut down the competition) or simply because the owner wants it despite the lost profits.

Tier 1 is too far up the supply chain to have the effect that you think it does. The netneutrality battle matters most to consumers on the last mile of transmission lines which determines the contracts. Worrying about tier 1 is like worrying about what is happening in Guatamala or El Salvador when you buy coffee on the world market, while ignoring the local market. But in any case, if your flawed understanding of how the Internet works leaves you fixated on tier 1 and you want to focus on that, boycotting is still the best move if you have the will power to walk. Boycotting the retail end of the transaction also boycotts tier 1, even if you hypthetically watch Netflix all day at the library instead of at home because the consolidation still yields less oversold unused bandwidth, less fat, and less revenue for the industry.

Your claim that your littering causes absolutely no social cost is absurd.

Yet you fail to support your claim that my use of the library has driven up the library’s cost for their flat rate contract. Your absurd litter analogy failed you because you failed to realise that consolidation of work reduces the work, reduces the infrastructure needed, and reduces the revenue it brings.

Your suggestion to don’t use the Internet was refuted at the very start when I explained that some government services, in particular schools, require internet for communication.

Your attempt failed when you failed to realise the reduction in revenue. They lose my subscription fee but the library does not have to pay the difference in excess of their costs.

Lemmy isn’t throttled because no one is paying them to do so.

Then your claim was bogus to begin with. I addressed the /potential/ scenario that you suggested; I never claimed that your suggestion was reality, just that it was flawed.

They can now legally throttle it below 56k. Physics has absolutely nothing to do with it.

It’s not the law the prevents the throttling. It’s the marketplace. The physical limit is low enough that it is the min tolerance the market will accept. Physical limits and marketplace limits are relevant, but legal rights to throttle are irrelevant when the dialup market won’t accept less than physical limits.

Because up until now you argued the opposite.

I never claimed a boycott is not sacrificial. I have advocated for boycotting, but that does not mean it’s not a sacrifice. Hence why I mentioned will power in the OP. Boycotts have consequences, which I accept.

Irrelevant to your original argument that there was no effect.

Your analogy has failed you. Your litter analogy supports the reality contrary to your thesis. Revenue is reduced when people consolidate their consumption with fewer flat-rate subscriptions. Just as litter cleanup has reduced costs in concentrations that need less infrastructure.

Your logic is off-target, as this is caused by “management”, not the individual.

It is management that I was referring to. That should be obvious. The incompetence belongs to whoever makes the incompetent decision, which in this case would be high in upper management.

It’s fair to assume in this case USPS is not that incompetently wasteful.

No. It isn’t.

The USPS is being intentionally mismanaged as a step towards dismantling the pillars of US government.

A safe assumption need not be an accurate assumption. It’s about consequences. Incompetence has consequences – and rightfully so. IOW, when the assumption is wrong, it does not obviate the purpose of my action. Therefore the assumption is safe.

That would not make economic sense. Why would they hand-enter grandma’s chicken scratch hand-written return address when it is not needed for outbound routing? Anyone wasting money like that is not competent for their job.

Just finding the return address takes time in itself. It could be on the top left, or it could be a one-liner just above the destination address, or it could be on the backside, or not even supplied. They should only be looking for it when it is needed.

It’s fair to assume in this case USPS is not that incompetently wasteful. But if they are, then that incompetence is the problem (not how we choose to address our envelopes).

For return service, indeed. In that very rare event, they would have to hand enter it just as they do for hand-written addresses.

Your sympathy is backwards though. Postal workers’s job security is under threat currently as people move away from postal service. Denmark eliminates postal service for the whole country this year.

(update) Also, other countries are downgrading the postal service and cutting staff in the drive toward digital transformation.

This to me falls under reasonable loss of privacy,

A good standard for what’s “reasonable” is set out by data minimisation principles, like what you have in Europe’s GDPR Article 5.

Storing the routing data on the envelope itself is a form of data minimisation, as opposed to collecting it into a DB.

without reading (or “scanning”) the adresses, how could the postal system work?

I believe USPS has been in service for over 100 years, and demonstrated the capability of mail delivery as far back as horseback delivery (before Alan Turing was born).

It was only in the past ~15 years or so that USPS began offering a notification service that recipients can subscribe to. You get an email showing raster scans of envelopes that are out for delivery or have been delivered, for those who fancy that. But this new service does not just scan images for subscribers. Either your region offers this extra feature, or not. And if they do, then they scan /everyones/ envelopes whether they subscribe or not. Perhaps all regions offer it now… I’m not up to date on the progress of this rollout.

pre-15 years ago (or so), the scanning was not building a database of images of envelopes (AFAIK). It was merely printing a barcode of the destination address for routing purposes. The barcode is not a reference to a DB record – it’s an actual address encodified. So this routing info is stored on the envelope itself, not in a DB.

As for codes that becomes invisible after scanning, what would the point be?

What do you mean “codes”?

They use the fluorescent ink for barcodes. I describe the idea of using a like-colored ink for textual addresses, so the human postal worker can still read it and use it for routing, but it would be useless for mass surveillance. And to be clear, the return address is only needed for return routing. Sure, if they read the return address for routing purposes they are also likely storing it in the DB, but it’s a fair trade-off at that point because it’s a rare circumstance that return service is triggered.

When you are a unregulated monopoly that’s exactly how it works. This is a regulation that was removed.

No, it’s not. Consumers still have a choice in an unregulated “monopoly”. Also, “monopoly” is not the correct word, hence the quotes. You’re speaking emotionally because you don’t like the options. Even if there were a monopoly hypothetically, people still have the choice in the US to abstain from subscribing.

Consumers typically have a choice between cable, DSL, fiber, WISP, satellite, dial-up, freeloading (libraries, universities, hacker spaces, cafes, etc), or no service at all (which is the most important option of all).

Your distorted view that a capitalist market does not control pricing is based in part on your misperception of monopoly.

The 56k isn’t the target. Your connection to your ISP continues to be 56k. The tier 1 that your dial up ISP connects to can now play favorites. They can get paid by Reddit to degrade Lemmy traffic. Physics has nothing to do with it.

Doesn’t matter. No Lemmy throttling is falling below 56k. Hence why physics matters (it’s the only bottleneck of concern to dial-up users).

So it does affect everyone.

Of course. Boycotts are inherently sacrificial. Why would think otherwise?

More trash on one street means that more service runs would be needed in a day. If the truck fills up and the street isn’t finished, another truck must come. If more trash didn’t require more clean up in an area, then no special service would be needed after large festivals- regular daily service would handle it.

It takes 2—4 people to clean up in under 2 hours precisely because automation and machines become economically viable.

Take that same litter and scatter it city-wide. 4 cleanup workers can’t even walk the whole city, or even jog the city, much less pick anything up. It does not make sense to use a shovel to pick up a cigarette butt. They use meter-long tongs. They aim the tip to straddle the cigarette butt, pinch. Sometimes I drops as they lift it, and they have to have another go. One item at a time. Then they walk ~2 meters for the next cigarette butt. A shovel for each piece of litter is too heavy and expends too much energy. So tongs makes sense for scattered litter.

When event trash is concentrated, one man’s shovel load does the work of 50 people scattered around the city. All those people need breaks too. It requires a staff of hundreds to cleanup a city-wide scattering of the same amount of litter, and still that’s over the course of multiple days. So you are off by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

I don’t recall off the top of my head what the average case length is in various member states, but it was published in 2024 when the EU collected reports on the GDPR progress. In 2024, everyone (people and orgs) could give the EU feedback on the GDPR’s effectiveness. I think it happens every 4 years. The report from the EDPB to the EC contained stats. So if you dig that up it will show what the average length of a complaint is. IIRC, 2 years was the worst average timeframe of all countries. I don’t recall which country had that average, but I tend to figure if my complaint idles for 2 years then I will consider it mothballed.

No because their ability to charge is no longer based on usage but on how much they feel like they want to extort.

That’s not how capitalism works. The market does not simply tolerate whatever price they “feel like they want”.

20% degrade of a 56k connection is huge.

Of course. It would be the same as discontinuing the service. There is no business case for downgrading a 56k connection. They either leave the business and give their market share to the competition, or the 56k goes at the speed physics will allow. There is no amount of bandwidth loss dial-up patrons will accept, and also no amount that can be re-allocated to a broadband VIP customer that would be noticed. Makes no sense.

I specifically referenced not using solar. Using your neighbor’s power means the neighbor pays more.

It does not. The neighbor also uses their own supply. Using the neighbor yields less revenue to the company. The injection is a cash cow for the energy company, who resells it for 10× what they pay. Paying the neighbor for their solar is a total loss for the energy company. They lose the cheap power they would get at a cheap injection rate, and they also lose the sale of power to you. The energy company gets less money than they do if neighbors do not collude.

You using the public library increases the library costs.

It does not. It’s a flat rate. Unless you are talking about energy. Indeed I use library a/c power, which (unlike Internet) is charged at a measured rate.

It’s tiny but it is there.

Internet is not a measured rate service. It’s a flat fee and budget-capped.

If everyone did it it would be significant.

To be significant would be to encroach on budgets. As I said, libraries in my area are clever enough not to blow budgets. Some libraries have timers and quotas to control consumption – control that is not in play on domestic subscriptions.

They are paid by taxes to keep the streets clean. It’s not distance or weight. If there is more littering, more street cleaners would be needed.

Not at all. The guy pulls along an industrial vacuum. He does not have to pull that machine down my street if I am the only one who was littering, and I divert my litter to a street that is already littered. Moving my litter from an otherwise unlittered block to an already littered block has the opposite effect that you claim. Less road coverage requires fewer workers. If everyone in the city puts all their litter on one block instead of scattering it, many street cleaners can be sent home.

This is in fact also necessary for your analogy to be accurate. If concentrating the same qty of litter in a smaller space were by some management’s incompetence lead to more cleaners, then the analogy does not accurately reflect the telecom service.

It matters because the service provider can dictate costs at both ends of the connection independent of the amount of data.

This is to the benefit of narrowband users, who are at the bottom of the spectrum and would pay the least of all tiers. Recall that you originally said it’s a problem for everyone, not just broadband users.

Buying solar from a neighbor is not paying a neighbor to use their power company provided power.

The point was that the local energy supplier has lower revenue. They don’t recuperate the loss of neighbors colluding to buy less of their supply. e> There are other taxes than income tax like sales tax. Besides not paying doesn’t change anything when you are still using it, “I don’t pay for electricity to save the environment. I use my neighbors who pay the electric company. They let me connect for free.”

I’m not sure how you’re not grasping this. If Bob sells excess solar power to Alice for less than the grid power, that’s strictly a loss for the energy company. It’s not a zero-sum scenario. The energy company does not recover that lost business.

You doing it alone doesn’t hurt the library

Of course. And hurting the library is not the goal or idea anyway. So no problem there.

The problem is with this claim:

The article is about EVERYONE doing it. If everyone used the public library internet, they’d have to increase their service.

First of all, libraries have fixed budgets. They cannot simply upgrade on a whim. Even if they do upgrade, there is still less /fat/ (oversold bandwidth). Library management is more clever than you think. When demand and supply curves start to cross, the library brings in quotas. PC users have a 2 hour timer, or more, depending on supply and demand. People who get cut off for the day have generally accomplished everything necessary by then anyway… they are just watching videos for amusement or doom scrolling, in which case no real compromise with sending them home.

ISP’s already oversell bandwidth. A neighborhood of 100 homes each with 1Gbs service doesn’t have a 100Gbs connection. When I ran and ISP, it was 20 to 1. We’d monitor bandwidth and everyone got “full bandwidth” because statistically everyone wasn’t simultaneously using the full bandwidth. It’s the same bandwidth for the provider whether there are separate under-utilized lines at homes or a giant pipe at the library.

You seem to have a chance at understanding considering you’re aware of this much. That oversell shrinks as people share (which is effectively the same as using the library). IOW, the fat that lines their pockets shrinks.

Which doesn’t matter because a lack of Net Neutrality still hurts everyone whether they use the library or use it at home.

If you’re willing to acknowledge that netneutrality is harmful, then you should be boycotting. The boycott action is using your consumer power to push back. If you do not boycott, then you are the one supporting it. You are then part of the problem.

“I throw my trash on the sidewalk and it’s gone the next day. It’s not a problem.”

For this analogy to work, it would be a case where I am the only one on my block littering, and I stop, so the street cleaner no longer needs to traverse my street. The street cleaner would lose revenue due to being paid by traversal distance. I would then be putting my litter on another block, by this analogy. And that other block would be routinely littered anyway, so the street cleaner would still get paid for the other block but not for mine. And since he is not paid by weight, but by distance, his net revenue is less. He can try to increase his prices per kilometer if he wants, but that has consequences. His competitors may not allow it. And governments have budgets.

Also realise that I have been offline for several days now, since libraries were closed the past few days and I did not have access. So my consumption is less as a consequence of this lifestyle of boycotting. Even if the library were open 24/7, I’m not going to stream Netflix or something in the library like I would at home. So my consumption drops inherently in the change.

It doesn’t even matter if POTS exists because it doesn’t change the net neutrality problem.

The analog service is capped by physics, not business. If you have a 56k modem, it doesn’t matter that netneutrality capped domestic service 1Mbit b/c dial-up service can’t reach that anyway. The netneutrality changed the business in a way that harms residential broadband customers who will get service that is artificially reduced by business practices (not by physics). Netneutrality is not going to cause dial-up customers to lose even more performance. If anything, they might even fair better because the ISP will be able to bring in more profits which could increase the effect of subsidy from higher payers. It certainly will not be detrimental to dial-up customers.

The point is your claiming you canceled internet doesn’t mean anything if you are using someone else’s internet. It’s like if you said, “I cancelled electricity to save the environment. I now run a power line from my neighbor who lets me use their electricity. I pay my neighbor instead of the power company.” You haven’t done actually done anything.

Actually that very thing is happening where I am, because the injection rates are so much lower than consumption rates that it’s very interesting for someone to sell their excess solar power to their neighbor than to the grid. The neighbor who buys that excess is not buying from the grid.

Likewise, my folks have broadband as well as their neighbor. Both homes use very little of their allowance. So if one cancels and shares with the other, the revenue from the two homes to the ISP will cut in half, but both households will experience no performance loss.

The reason they won’t do it because they erroneously think it is somehow morally wrong. But in fact I was surprised to find that it’s not against the ToS.

Using the local library is paying for it. Your taxes are paying for it.

What taxes? Are you assuming I have a job and pay income tax?

You using more bandwidth at the library will cause the library to upgrade their service

It will not. Just like with my folks, the library already has more than enough broadband for the few people who use it. It can take a big hit… it can even lose 75% of its current speed and I will be fine.

Even if a notable portion of the neighborhood did the same thing, and the library was forced to upgrade, that upgrade would cost less than the aggregate total of all the households who cancel their service because more of the underutilised but compensated bandwidth would go to use.

You cancelling home service while still using the Internet hasn’t done anything.

For the past several months, the ISP has received zero from me. I have noticed no change in the library’s Internet service since I became a more regular user. So there was no shift in funding AFAICT.

Pots is regulated under telecommunications services. Ilecs got broadband to be exempt from teleco regulations 25 years ago. Besides dial up is a tiny market and in most cases completely unavailable.

It’s available; people just don’t know about it. I asked the POTS supplier for ISDN. Answer: no. Called back later, spoke to someone else, answer: yes. It’s so rare that some of the telecom sales staff are not even aware of their own services.

Dialup ISPs are getting more centralised as the business shrinks. But I think there will always be some operating because they tend to be nationwide and not limited to an area code.

already covered this when I said this affects cell phones or you are using other’s wifi. As I already said, the Internet you are connecting to is affected even if you are avoiding paying for it personally.

Sure, but what’s the point? It’s not to get access to a faster service. If that’s your concern, then you can simply buy the higher business class service (and become part of the problem in exchange for being impeded by it).

It’s about not feeding tyranny. The public library (my means of access) would indeed be affected by the same business shenannigans, but if I am not paying for it then I am not feeding it. They lose my subscription fees for being bad players. That‘s the point.

This is an article about American laws. It doesn’t apply to Europe. It is a requirement because government, hospitals and in particular schools have switched to Internet for communication. I got a letter about an adjustment to my taxes which said, “login at this url to pay this bill”. My children’s notifications about, school calendars, school delays and buses are all text messages and emails.

I have a foot in both places. I have only been forced online in Europe, never in the US. I would like to hear more detail about being unable to pay your tax bill offline because that amounts to forced banking, something I thought was non-existent in the US, where legal tender is defined as having a right to pay debts in cash. If you are quite far from a tax office, I would more readily believe that. But even then, it was just a few years ago that I was able to pay a tax bill by snail-mailing a paper check. Is that option dead under some tax regime? Is it a local tax admin that refuses cash?

I’ve lost touch with US schools but I have read about the shitshow of primary and secondary schools handing out Google Chromebooks and requiring students to use them as well as requiring them to agree to Google’s ToS. Bus delay notifications sounds more like a convenience. People tend to confuse convenience with necessity in recent years. Tim Wu’s tyranny of convenience essay has not reached as many people as it should.

It’s not just broadband. It is all internet service.

I think broadband was the right term. If you have dial-up service over ISDN or analog POTS, the narrow form of netneutrality being litigated (throttling) would not have much impact on narrowband users because they are bottlenecked quite a bit inherently anyway.

The caveat is that latency can be so poor as to downgrade a narrowband connection – in which case you would be correct. Depending on circumstances. VOIP is possible over analog POTS so long as latency is not sabotaged.

You cannot cancel all internet service. It has become a requirement for living in the modern world like electricity.

I have. This year I pulled the plug and live without Internet at home. Because I will not lick their boots.

I admit that not everyone has the tech literacy to do this. It requires being able to work offline and periodically entering a public hotspot to run scripts that sync whatever is needed. It’s a time management skill that requires some discipline and/or coding.

The !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz community cators for this lifestyle:

https://sopuli.xyz/c/right_to_unplug

When you say “it’s a requirement”, I’m not sure where you are. I know that in Europe public administrations are closing their doors and forcing everyone online for public service. That is indeed an assault on people’s autonomy and a fight worth fighting. Thus in some situations, choosing to live offline also entails the will power to fight court battles. It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure.

There is a new law that allows merchants to stop giving paper receipts.

The forced use of e-receipts in Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, England, & Italy)