The state of mind is changing though, especially with Facebook - Europeans are aware what happened to the US in the last few years and are scared of a new wave of fascism powered by High-Tech social networks and fake news, more so than US citizens. This won't lead to a European competitor for Facebook though, just to regular people shunning everything that's made in the US. So in the long term only China will profit from the US's tendency to create (too) big corporations. The bigger is better mindset is ultimately not compatible with European values.

But what has Whatsapp to do with innovation? There's nothing innovative about a messenger app. They only thing they did is degrade privacy even further.

Whatsapps original purpose wasn’t where it reached its niche. It was in the right place at the right time - it launched as it became easy to distribute apps, and it used free data (wifi or gprs) to undercut sms. This latter fact wasn’t valuable in the west, but was great in poorer countries.

This built up the network, and unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden.

I have no idea why it was valued at however many billions though even with that.

There’s nothing special about WhatsApp that signal and telegram don’t do other than that existing network, primarily driven by laziness of the consumer (as there’s no reason you cant have all the apps installed)

> primarily driven by laziness of the consumer

oh yes :(

> unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden

That's why politics should make sure those walled gardens have huge holes all around those walls. And no, its not the politicians fault, its the fault of the voters that they don't put politicians in power doing these things.