It always bothers me when I hear people say this, it's everyone's responsibility that their devices don't become part of a botnet or worse used to take part in an attack against infrastructure that we're increasingly dependent upon that either makes for an unpleasant time for people or threatens lives.

99.9% of devices are owned by someone who has absolutely zero technical ability to fulfill this responsibility. So I'd say the responsibility needs to be satisfied another way. Maybe it escalates to the ISP.

I mean, unless we start issuing Internet Licenses the way we do Driver's Licenses.

In the early 2000s my cable provider would outright shut off our Internet if my dumb brother or my dumb self got us all virused up.

I agree, most don't have the technical ability to administrate their devices although I'm not sure if that excuses basic competence. I like the idea that an ISP would disable the connection of a subscriber however that would depend on how they define malicious activity.

If ISPs were basic utilities it would probably be a fairly safe responsibility to give them. But no, they're media corporations, so they have an inherent drive to abuse that power.

What you’re describing as “basic competence”, which is removing viruses from a PC in this case, would exclude 99% of users.

A responsibility is meaningless if most people have no practical means to exercise that responsibility.

One step in the right direction is to drop the marketing bullshit of "unlimited internet" (which doesn't exist) and always meter it, but make it completely transparent.

If your smart toaster is saturating your bandwidth, it should show up as an expensive line-item on your bill. You should see that "SmartToast9000" used $80 of bandwidth, "baidu.com" used $17 because it used your bandwidth to ddos. And, of course, the tooling to catch these things before they escalate would likely become part of our computing devices.

Right now, everything is completely opaque to the end-user and we all suffer except for bad actors. It's a problem when we can't even estimate how much bandwidth we used in a month off the top of our head. Instead it should be informing our decisions from the IoTrash we buy to which websites we use.

Example: the internet was regularly awful at my girlfriend's house. We couldn't figure it out despite calling the ISP. On a suspicion, I helped my gf install a bandwidth monitor on her laptop. We found that a recipes website she often had open would get stuck in some sort of ad-loading retry loop due to her adblocker and would saturate her download bandwidth as long as she had it open.

It's completely ridiculous to me that there's no feedback built in to the browser when I think it should be a first-class UI component. I think transparent + metered bandwidth (at a fair price of course) would start the ball rolling on this kind of tooling. Until then, it's like everything acts like bandwidth is unlimited.