[InitialLastName]

Something tells me that Algeria probably hasn't moved its entire social infrastructure online quite as aggressively as the US. Presumably there is still some offline telephony (POTS? Cellular service? SMS?) that functions to do almost everything that you listed.

Hell, we had credit cards and chain banking long before we had consumer access to the internet, and both of those require communication with a centralized authority.

[andix]

Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed.

From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.

[Off]

Sorry for the late reply, to answer your first question:

  How does economy deal with it? If there is no internet there is no banking, no card payments. Most offices will be shut down. How do emergency services operate? Companies can't order goods, or receive orders. It must be even worse than complete lock down because of COVID.

Well, our economy isn't centered around the Internet that much, we have some variant of a local debit card called CIB and those cards aren't allowed to be used online to purchase goods or services, we can only use them to pay the bills and most people use them to withdraw money at the ATMs. Master Card and Visa debit cards are available but the fees are too high, and both have the same restrictions, they don't work when used online. Most orders are done in person, over the phone, via email, or using online stores and paying cash at the delivery.

Also, most people use the CCP service of Algerie Post[0] to send and receive money nationally.

  Have you ever been to Algeria? I haven't, but I've been to most other countries in North Africa. They don't live in tents there. The cities are quite developed.

If you've been to Tunisia and Morocco, the banking experience there is far better, they don't have restrictions on the cards.

  From my experience those kind of countries moved all their infrastructure far more aggressively online, than the US. Most of the infrastructure wasn't built in the pre-internet era, like in the US or Western Europe, but way later.

Not really, from what i know living here, we already had the infrastructure of phones before the democratization of the Internet, i remember using dialup modems to connect to the internet back in the 2000s.

[0]: https://www.poste.dz/