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@edri

>Public administration, banks and energy suppliers, as well as employers, health providers… have moved online, and counters, mail services and phone lines are disappearing.
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>Yet, more than 40% of Europe’s population still lacks basic digital skills, preventing them from accessing certain essential services.
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>There is an urgent need to guarantee off-line access to all essential services.

Those counters, mail services, and phone lines are ultimately all talking to online digital systems, one way or another. Keeping them around may kick the can down the road, but it certainly feels like tackling a symptom rather than the source of the problem. "Offline access" is a misnomer; it's really "proxied online access."

>Training and the automation of rights: problematic solutions
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>We recognize the many efforts taken by the EU and its members states to trigger digital inclusion and widen assistance for vulnerable people to access digital services. These efforts, however, are only part of the solution to the issue of digital inequality.
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>Regardless of how much money is invested in training services, learning takes time – particularly for the 20% of Europeans with low overall literacy levels. [6] Moreover, some digital technologies and tools will remain out of reach for people with disabilities who often already face barriers with regard to general education.
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>Automated data processing, made available through the growing development and use of digital platforms, may create further issues for individuals and families facing social exclusion. Data analysis algorithms have been heralded as a way for citizens to access healthcare and social services, yet this technology might reinforce discrimination instead of tackling it. Recent examples in the Netherlands [7] and France [8] show that thousands of families have been wrongly suspected or even accused of social fraud by algorithms that reinforce racial, class or gender stereotypes, in some cases depriving households of the income they need to survive.

Low literacy, inaccessible websites, and algorithmic discrimination are all non-technical problems. They are political problems: political problems that will persist regardless of the channels used to access services.

>We are aware that digitisation is a global trend that will continue, but we call upon EU leaders to act to slow down unrestricted digitalisation of essential services and avoid the growth of digital inequalities.
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>We are therefore asking for a moratorium that would freeze the development of digitisation of essential services on a European scale.

I don't live in the EU, but I suspect that freezing the development of digital services altogether is going to be a political non-starter for the majority of its citizens that are demanding digitization.

>A moratorium is necessary in order to restore accessibility to all essential services, and would require the right to multichannel access (the click-call-connect principle) to be protected in European law. Offline channels such as counters and phone-based helplines should be provided to cover citizens’ needs and should not involve any additional costs.

Ultimately, I think I can nevertheless get behind the click-call-connect principle, especially if tackling the underlying political problems isn't feasible. But outright freezing the development of digital services would surely violate the "click" portion of the click-call-connect principle, no?

Dropping some tags to get other folks' input on the matter.