No one is saying to break up Facebook and give it to the government. The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete. It is an attempt to make the market more competitive.
That seems like your own interpretation of the tweet. The author says in a later tweet that they think Whatsapp should be treated as a utility. That seems to suggest they do want Whatsapp to be handed to the government.
Comcast/AT&T etc are not utilities, nor are they classified as such.
Or phone calls. There are tons of telcos and they are interoperable.
* Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s)
* If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency
* Even if all mail isn't delivered on all days, letters from the government or letters announcing someone died are still delivered
* If a city is "serviced" by two highways they can't both be closed at the same time
* Etc.
In some countries, governments (or utilities etc.) use WhatsApp in critical processes and communication. So just like the things above, WA should be considered in these contingency plans. Stuff like:
* WhatsApp cannot be the only contact info agencies have - they need at least a backup contact method
* Facebook should announce maintenance activities to WA to these governments in a standardized fashion
* Facebook has to commit to keeping (the main functionality of) WA free of charge
* Etc.
If Facebook doesn't want to commit to stuff like that - fine, but then the consequence should be that WA is no longer considered a valid tool for critical communication, as Facebook then clearly sees it as a "hobby app" that can go down for hours without real consequence.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.
Same doesn’t apply to WA.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...
Likewise, when Whatsapp goes down I can still talk to people on iMessage or Discord or SMS.
I’m talking about 911 being reachable, or about government communication with its citizens etc.
For these bigger use cases, there are contingency plans. For example, 911 will remain reachable via other carriers for you even when your carrier goes down.
For some governments, WA is in the critical path for these use cases. And you can’t route around WA as it’s one product by one company who is the sole maintainer of it.
Critical emergency services still have the plain old telephone services to use, no?
In my experience, it makes it less reliable, since that service will no longer have to compete with anybody else.
I don't get the distinction you're drawing? These apps are very directly akin to utilities like mail (usually government-run) or phone (usually semi-privatized but heavily regulated), and they're natural monopolies for which market competition can't be expected to work well.
Whatsapp is just an app. It just happens to be a popular one and people chose to use it. That's it. Just like ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc.
Hard disagree. In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens. And it is also deeply ingrained into the private economy for communication.
I'm making the assumption here that Facebook likes that the above happens and that their IM app is the "chosen one". But usage like that also gives Facebook the obligation to make sure WA works.
Last time I checked everything but private use was against their TOS. Other than that this sounds like a horrible situation the government should be blamed for.
The uptime of Comcast where I live is definitely an order of magnitude lower than any large internet site. I have no other options for high speed internet, which doesn't seem to be a particularly bad deal for Comcast...
These are also usually the people close to government or in it unfortunately.
I would think it would be more like how AT&T was broken up into all the baby bells. Take WhatsApp, break it apart into 100 companies that must interoperate and see what happens.
Putting a little more maturity into their SOP isn’t the worst thing.
How often Facebook really breaks? I've had a much higher number of electricity blackouts and internet outages in the last decade than Facebook going down. Basically I don't even recall Facebook ever going down for that long, or breaking in any other way.
If you want to be taken serious as a messenger app, you need to align your corporate culture and processes to reflect that.
Like, do we expect the government to take WhatsApp away from Facebook and then create government contracts for companies like Oracle to maintain the infrastructure? So we’re back to square one but with the bureaucratic mess of the government involved?
The answer to all of this is very rarely “break it apart and give it to the government.” It might work for utilities and public works, but do we seriously believe that apps - the interfaces of the utilities - need to be regulated? I don’t get these arguments, and I see them everywhere.