alt Hacker NewsConsumer protection legislation would be a way to solve this:
If a business has more than X employees / does more than X amount of business per year / has more than X physical locations (pick one or more, make up some new criteria, tune to suit the needs of society) it must offer the same capabilities to interact with the business to those without smart phones as those with.
Small businesses wouldn't be radically impacted because they generally aren't "Internet only" anyway. The large business that are impacted have plenty of resources to handle compliance. If anything I'd argue it levels the playing field to an extent.
Replies
I had some thoughts on dynamic tax rates depending on how desirable a product or service is.
Then can do standard formulas like, will operations continue if the power is out, internet, smart phones, running water, phone lines, payment processing, etc, how long will service be down 1-3 days, weeks, months etc
If your store can't immediately switch to cash apply some modest tax increase. If people can't buy food for more than a week the extra tax is high. You might want to buy gas lamps and a "home" battery.
some immediate thoughts that pop in my head are:
1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:
2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.
it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?
(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)