When had all sms or phone service in your country gone down? Sure a carrier might have issues - but there are other carriers who can pick up the load and there are likely government contingency plans for just that situation.

Same doesn’t apply to WA.

The sms and phone service infrastructure is more centralised than you might think and carriers probably have less redundancy than big tech when it comes to it.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...

If my carrier goes down, it doesn't help me I can't just switch at the drop of a hat to another carrier who is still up.

Likewise, when Whatsapp goes down I can still talk to people on iMessage or Discord or SMS.

What I’m talking about here isn’t my WA group chat with my soccer team.

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.

What country uses WhatsApp for emergency services??? That sounds like a terrible idea completely independent from Facebook Corp.

Critical emergency services still have the plain old telephone services to use, no?

this likely depends on the point of view. ie. if you count the offline hours of all telcos vs. whatsapp, sure wa comes out on top. but from the perspective of an individual, the availability of wa is far lower than that of my mobile phone network.

>Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable.

In my experience, it makes it less reliable, since that service will no longer have to compete with anybody else.

Why would regulation mean no longer having competition? There are lots of highly regulated industries with lots of fierce competition.