>If you think it unlikely that there's people that don't use browsers, come to my next family reunion or city council meeting.

given the statistic cited earlier of over 5 billion people using the internet and there are 7.8 billion people in the world, 1.4 billion of them in China, which has slightly over 1 billion on the internet, 1.4 billion in India, which has evidently 759 million on the internet, etc. etc. I think it is most likely that we find the largest concentrations of people without internet in non-Western countries and in less developed regions.

>My example is a bunch of old people

There are nearly 270 thousand people age 75 and over in the world, that age being also over the age of retirement in many places. I doubt you are actually discussing people that are 75 and over.

How old are these "old" people that don't use browsers?

Consider that IE6 was released in 2001, 22 years ago. Someone 33 years old at that time would be 55 now. Probably a good age for a legislator.

I never said it was unlikely that people don't use browsers, but given the statistics outlined above it seems statistically unlikely that there would be a significant concentration of them in any group legislating the internet, although you seem invested in the idea that this is so.

Do I think it is possible that if I went to your family reunion would I meet someone who did not use browsers - sure - also if I went to your city council meeting. Assuming 12 people on the council a naive calculation of 5 billion internet users on the planet would lead me to saying maybe 5 don't, but given the other factors outlined here I would think it statistically strange if it were more than 2.

What percentage of people at your family reunion, and city council meeting, do you think do not use browsers and if it is anomalous in relation to the statistics outlined here - how do you account for this anomaly?

on edit: also I live in Denmark, every politician here knows how trains work and has probably spent a significant amount of their life commuting on trains.

on second edit: regarding your previous example of encryption; the difference between encryption and a browser is the difference between lithium-ion batteries and Electric cars. The first is a functionality of an application, the second is an application.

Pretty much everyone has an understanding of the application and what they do to make it work, hardly anyone has understanding of how the underlying technology works. It may be useful to have people who know how the underlying technology works to legislate on it, but not knowing how HTTPS works or how the browser interprets the file formats it receives back from a request is not the same as not knowing what a browser is and I originally responded to the suggestion that people did not know what a browser is.

Regarding old age - I can see that in the U.S the median age of U.S. senators is 65 and the median age of representatives in the House is 58, so in the case of those age 65 I would be willing to suppose there is a larger percentage of them who do not know what a browser is - so maybe 40% of those over 65 do not know, and with vanishingly smaller numbers as you get closer to 50.

There's 14 senators 50 and younger, I bet all of them know what a browser is.