> it's probably not a bad guess that they would lose more users globally due to the bad publicity it would generate than they would lose by cutting off Belgium.
But this is what all the tech companies do in China.
I don't think its hard to "defend" complying with the Belgian government that faces a terrorist network and drug cartel problem bigger than any other 1st world country (in relative terms).
> Poking a hole in that seems non-trivial.
They operated without E2E for many years though. I doubt that non-encrypted chat is even revoked. And even if they pulled, there's many alternatives available. It's not like Belgium is worried about Meta's revenue.
With regards to E2E, I wonder how it would work when you want to chat with someone outside Belgium though. If I'm the person outside Belgium, I wouldn't want E2E to be disabled just like that. And if WhatsApp can only be used between Belgians, that's quite a hinderance.
Belgium doesn't care about Meta revenue and rightly so, but if a law would be the reason that Meta pulls the plug on Belgium, that seems like a cause for a possible serious political backlash.
For your second point, to me that's the same kind of feature work GP was talking about: Just add a little UI that says "Hey, you're speaking with someone in a country that doesn't support encryption. Your messages are unencrypted".
Also agreeing with GP, screw Meta! As a Belgian I could care less about one company when it comes to the rights and laws of my country. They can definitely make suggestions like everyone else, but they also need to follow each country's laws like everyone else.
On the technical front, your examples are good and valid, but they seem like features that are pretty straight forward to feature flag per country. Something like disabling end-to-end encryption looks a lot more intrusive to me (without being a subject matter, feel free to correct me). Whatever WhatsApp built, they built it to enable end-to-end encryption on a global scale, to enable anyone from around the globe to send an encrypted message around the globe. Poking a hole in that seems non-trivial.