When we had that power outage in Spain, for a brief period we had a taster of what the world used to be: we had electricity/TV/radio but no Internet access. I must say it was delightful but I'm not sure how it would be long-term. My world-view certainly opened up with Internet access.
ps. I considered using em dash in this paragraph but decided against it due to LLM's using it. Made me a little bit self-conscious for a second. I am self-editing myself not to be mistaken with an AI.
Is there a press release from this BSI? Wish we got better than opinions from both news sites and comments. I also suspect the youth define "internet" as 5 apps.
For most people, Snapchat, Tiktok, Discord, WhatsApp and other toxic environments is the de facto internet because it makes up 99% of their usage time.
It gets worse in poorer countries, where ISPs made deals with Facebook (ever wondered why some Indians are not able to google? Because google costs money, facebook groups doesn't). Additionally, whole infrastructures run on WhatsApp. In those regions you'll see WhatsApp numbers on container ships, trains, harbor buildings, factories etc because it's easier than maintaining a website for that.
(Edit: see my comment about internet.org)
The younger generation only uses smartphones because parents cannot afford to pay for both a laptop and a smartphone. Ask any teacher about that, they'll easily confirm this.
The problem we're facing is the overproprietarization of the internet. What we see as an internet where we can find information and learn about things, they see misinformation, propaganda, toxic shitstorms, and distraction. Even youtube has gone to shit, what started out as a new way to access knowledge in an entertaining way its early days.
And it's not only that, you can't even point kids to a safe website that will give them only links to learn/study about topics they're interested in, because google meanwhile has fully embraced its evil side of corporate greed that even the founders knew about was morally a conflict of interest in the beginning.
A lot of countries are thinking about banning smartphones from schools for this very reason. We (as a society) built apps so morally and uncontrollably bad that we created a whole generation of kids with self-induced ADHD, and now we're wondering why we have an education and therapy crisis.
Duh.
The biggest question is why are they doing things they obviously dislike. Even peer pressure can't really explain it.
They think they would, maybe. Half would starve within a week
The big assumption here is if they know what the internet is.
There was a time when it was a big series of tubes.
Easy they can get a feature phone and delete all social media accounts.
Highly specific subset of Internet. Not to disagree, but this is like saying people want to terminate voltage delivery to the home because they don't like radio.