Particularly given that you have a whole generation now that grew up with these technologies, the proportion of technically litterate users will go up over time not down.

I'm not that optimistic. Technical literacy tends to peak with literate/interested users who saw the rise of a technical medium. (E.g., I guess, my grandfather knew more about the intrinsics of a radio, even if I try to educate myself watching tube radio repair videos. High frequency stuff was generally sorted out, before I was born. I'm a high frequency native, but not necessarily an expert.) As things start to become more complex and tend to be more tightly integrated at the same time, the underlying technology somewhat vanishes. If you are faced with this as a fait accompli, it isn't natural anymore to investigate what is ultimately an opaque module. However, this opaque module is our universal means of production, communication and creativity. We may have to counteract what may be a tendency towards simplification and taking things for granted.

I don't know... I've known the internet since before the web was the internet. I know there's irc, ftp, etc. To those that grew up with the web, there is nothing beyond the web. The web is the internet. At the rate we're going, in time the new generations will rarely see a URL and won't know what they are exactly or what they're for. Google will be a necessary gateway to access anything on the internet.

But what you are describing is a tiny insignificant minority of very technical users from the 90s, amongst a population who didn't understand it at all (cf all the 1990s movies where the actor turns off the monitor instead of the computer!).

What I am trying to point at is the vast number of users born after 1990 that have a decent basic understanding of these technologies. And within that generation, the portion that has a similar deep understanding to 1990s users is a population which by absolute size is several orders of magnitude larger what it was in the 1990s. And it is going to keep increasing.

You said:

> the proportion of technically litterate users will go up over time not down.

I take the proportion to mean "out of all internet/computer users". That has gone down. And that's the proportion that I think matters as it's what dictates the direction internet/computer technologies go. The proportion is going down, precisely because more people are using these technologies and the majority are not willing to learn as much.

>To those that grew up with the web, there is nothing beyond the web

arguably the web is the legacy thing for places that dont have apps, and native apps are mostly what they are familiar with.

That's absolutely not true. See e.g. how literate are people about cars, vs. how they were 40 years ago.

See also the classical 2013 rant on the topic: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co....

Growing up with technologies is not enough to be technically literate. I would say it's the opposite, you grew up with it so you don't really think about how it works.

It's the fallacy of digital natives: http://ecdl.org/policy-publications/digital-native-fallacy

If that would be true, we would see much more skepticism against home assistant technologies, social networks, "funny apps" and alike. I think people fail to grasp the full impact of technology on their lives, although (or because) they are surrounded by it.

Don't you think that the worlds-largest provider of search services, ad services, mail services, video services, smartphone operating system vendor and more would profit, one way or another, if people are technically uneducated and don't understand the things that are happening "behind the scenes" of their browser?

What's gained by people understanding what's happening behind the scenes? We don't expect people to understand the details of how their car engine works, or how digital radio signals are encoded and decoded, why should we make it necessary that they do so for the internet?

So long as sites that aren't using SSL are highlighted, and its not possible to spoof the browser into displaying a domain you're not looking at, I honestly don't see what benefit the typical user gets from seeing https://www.google.com vs google.com.

> We don't expect people to understand the details of how their car engine works

You may be amused, but in Europe the technical details of a car engine, transmission, breaks, etc, and how to perform a quick repair have been part of the drivers test (and was still, when I made mine). It was a three parts test, involving a technical part, a legal part, regarding rules and laws regulating traffic, and, finally, a practical test. (Similarly, understanding how analog radio works was part of high school curriculum.) This was based on the conviction that dealing with a technology also afforded a basic understanding of it, not the least for legal/liability reasons.

Analogously, just making that red "No SSL" alert "go away" may be not enough. It may be preferable, if users were to understand what this is and why it is important, what the possibles consequences are, etc, if they would be actively looking for this, if they would and could confirm the mode of their interaction. Not the least for legal/liability reasons. (Teach them first to never engage in any critical interaction unless there's a verified, secure connection as indicated by such and such icon or signal. Facilitate them in asserting this. Then put on an additional warning light, but don't replace the former by the latter. There's no "easy mode", no "My First Sony" – which was, by today's standards overly complex, anyway –, when it comes to your livelihood.)

In this day and age, you're supposed to connect to your car via CAN-bus and perform tweaks with firmware and find failures via data from sensors. Even then, you're mostly operate on a high level, like, turn off ABS or whatever subsystem. Guys who started with old-school "get this car jacked" by getting hands greased finally ended up with patching firmware till morning. A quick car repair you mentioned unlikely goes beyond swapping a tire with a spare.

> What's gained by people understanding what's happening behind the scenes?

A critical mass of people able to make informed technical decisions — which is what both business & democratic self-government require.

> We don't expect people to understand the details of how their car engine works, or how digital radio signals are encoded and decoded, why should we make it necessary that they do so for the internet?

We don't expect them to know the deep details of those technologies, but we do expect them to know that flammable gasoline powers an engine; we do expect them to know that radio signals can be received by anyone with a receiver (and a key, if encrypted).

Unless you're implying educated people don't use search, ad, mail, video, etc?

No, but technically educated people are able to find alternatives, question why things are happening the way they are and improve their experience, by something as simple as using an adblocker. Big tech companies, I think this is not limited to Google, are not interested in that. People shall use their gated communities and that's enough of the internet.