The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient.

We can nix convenience. There are three scenarios:

1. exclusively digital/online access
2. exclusively analog/offline access
3. ppl have a choice between digital and analog

In case 3, convenience is assured because people can choose whatever method they find most convenient. Case 1 is probably convenient to most unless CAPTCHAs and similar enshitification is in play, but the rest are marginalised or burdoned. Case 2 is unlikely because even if analog is on offer it still makes sense to deploy digital in parallel for the cost savings, as the bulk of users favor digital.

We can disregard convenience on the part of the public service workers b/c they are compensated regardless. Workers choose the gig they want to sign up for. So it boils down to cost savings w.r.t the public service side of this.

I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Art.21-2: “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

Saving a buck is not great rationale for denying fundamental human rights. There should be a good reason, like for example denying someone who needs a heart transplant their right to life because the list of those needing a heart is longer than organs available.

You could say: ok, we will give free Internet and hardware to all those who are offline, assuming they can handle it. It could only still be economically sensible if all such people are walking distance from a public library. But there are still other human rights to account for: the right to privacy (Art.12) and the right to autonomy (a derivitive right from Art.1 dignity/self-determinism).

Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

“Data minimization” is an important policy which has already been implemented in Europe (2016) and a few other places that have tried to do a GDPR-like policy (California, and Australia IIRC). In Europe it’s a bit of a disaster. Even though strictly speaking GDPR Art.5 is violated when public web services block Tor, they are nonetheless blocking Tor with reckless disregard and effectively laughing at complaints. People in some countries cannot even get /read/ access to legal statutes from Tor. There is a GDPR rule requiring data controllers to be diligent with infosec and implementing protective mechanisms to ensure this. Rightfully so, but the effect is that this becomes an excuse to shrug off the Tor community. They ultimately have a legal defense of claiming anti-Tor measures are to comply with infosec mandates (though in reality it’s sloppy lazy IT admins who blocks Tor).

I have little hope for competency prevailing. In principle, data could be secured without blocking Tor. But that conversation is quite far from taking place AFAICT. I’m almost certain the courts would take the lazy way out. What judge would risk forcing a data controller to serve Tor users and then being responsible for an attacker who uses Tor when exploiting some unrelated vuln?

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service.

If your choices are send email to the gov (who selected MS for their email supplier) or to send a letter, then boycott rights are sufficiently respected.

For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service.

A national post service is itself a public service. When the gov depends on the gov for service, that’s about as non-controversial as it gets. Someone who opposes the government should be more focused on leaving the jurisdiction they have contempt for.

If the gov were to do something stupid like outsource the national postal service to Federal Express (a private courier service in the US who finances right-wing politics), then having an alternative would be important. If the alternative is Microsoft, then it’s a choice between two shit options; in which case I would demaned yet another option, like fax.

But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme.

I find it obnoxiously extreme to force people into the marketplace to patronize a particular corporation. It’s not the same as the gov itself internally supporting harmful corporation, which is quite rampant in the US but out of our hands. When individuals are forced to directly lick the boots of an evil corporation, it’s an extra hightened degree of abuse. It’s an assault on self-determinism. I will not feed a baddy. I insist. Nothing is more tyrannical than forcing someone to proactively take an action that goes against their beliefs.

Americans do not have a fundamental right to consumer protection. But Europeans do. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union Art.38 states: “Union policies shall ensure a high level of consumer protection.”

Despite that right, consumer protection is still a shit-show in Europe. People rely on incompetent unmotivated consumer protection agencies to take action. So for me, the most important consumer protection is that which does not rely on the action of others – the right to boycott. I don’t know if a court would agree that a right to boycott derives from the right to consumer protection, but I am running with it. I will march all the way to the supreme court if I must, to push my claim on a right to boycott.

If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries?

There are countless street markets and farmer’s markets selling their produce for cash. The only thing digital is the scale. Mom and pop shops have old fashioned cash registers. I would only imagine the supermarket chains use the cloud. The giants are not transparent enough for customers to even know what they use internally. Websites of 4 of the giants around me block Tor. One of them even uses Cloudflare which masks their hosting provider but I boycott Cloudflare anyway. Indeed I boycott the 4 chains on that basis.

I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

In some cases I patronize the lesser of evils, depending on the level of despiration or need. In other cases I boycott entire industries. There are only 3 or 4 mobile carriers and I have a problem with all of them. If I despirately needed mobile phone service I would pick the lesser of evils. But I have opted to give them all the middle finger because I don’t really need the service.

All washing machines have undocumented kill switches. So I am hand-washing my clothes until that changes.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

I’d have to say not even close. Do a search on /dark patterns/. There are countless abuses digital systems can push precisely because of the efficiency of automation. Analog systems entail manual labor which inherently limits the extent of tyranny and abuses due to resource limitations. Analog systems are also hard to conceal. You can’t stick a guy in a windowless office writing code to collect and abuse data on a large scale in an analog system. The demand for more human labor in analog systems means trusting more people to keep secrets.

I also don’t know what would be the analog version of a broken CAPTCHA that cannot be solved, which would block advancing to the next step.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services?

Indeed there is insufficient direct pressure on govs to protect privacy. Which is precisely why it is critical to mitigate the data collection in the first place. They can’t get your IP address from your postal letter. But if you concede to giving up analog methods, abuse has no limits. In the US there is no concept of gov transparency… no way to confidently know what they are collecting and what they are doing with the data.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

You seem to be answering your own question. Fighting to keep an offline option on the table is the only control you have on the abuse. They are limited by budgets. So if analog processing eats up a significant amount of budget, that’s less money that can be spent on mass surveillance abuses.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy.

Privacy and boycott rights have become inseparable. Boycotting used to simply be a matter of not buying something. Now with surveillance advertising in play, boycotting requires privacy. Not feeding Microsoft requires not sharing personal data with MS, thus not sending email that traverses their servers.

It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

Privacy has been a fundamental right in the UDHR since 1948, IIUC. From there, it barely has much effect. Snowden pretty much made it quite clear that you cannot rely on privacy as a fundamental right. Even if a privacy law could be respected in some hypthetical world, you still have CAPTCHAs, forced apps (JavaScript and/o