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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see FB shutting down a service like Watsapp in Europe in the next decade at least, first of all because countless European politicians use it, to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of Europeans who use it regularly. There’s nothing else comparable that can take its place.

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Telegram? Signal? Viber? Matrix?

I feel like all of these apps (with special emphasis on Telegram and Signal) have almost the exact same UX and features of WhatsApp... beyond adoption numbers.

Surely one of these can take its place?

Matrix is used by the French government [1] and the German military [2]. I’m honestly surprised Matrix isn’t robustly funded by the EU yet as an open competitor to US Big Tech.

[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23152780

Telegram, I think Signal, too. There are alternatives, they're just not as popular now.

Telegram may be getting momentum, but it’s nothing near the usage of WhatsApp over here. Signal nobody knows anything about, there’s nobody on there.

I think this is very local. Here in Sweden I have only ever met one person who used Whatsapp. I feel most people use Facebook messenger with some use of Skype, Google Hangouts, Telegram, Signal and Slack.

In at least France, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, WhatsApp is very popular.

By popular I mean "small businesses start advertising contacting them through WhatsApp"-popular.

It would be nice to have a breakdown of these numbers but we'll probably never get them from FB.

Do telcos in US/Europe create the same incumbency that telcos in Latin America create?

Here in Mexico, any mobile data package comes with free data for blessed services like Whatsapp and FB Messenger. Obviously trying to compete with each other on these perks.

Using a competitor like Telegram is a complete nonstarter when trading memes or video chat eats into your data. The cheapest plan from Telcel (pay-as-you-go + holding 20 pesos in your balance) lets you use Whatsapp infinitely.

GG to competition.

They do the same thing here, yes.

But if the EU decides to legislate against FB, for example, I doubt they'll be that silly, they'll probably shoot these clauses down.

In Sweden they do not do that for messenger clients but they do it for video streaming sites. Data is so cheap here that a messenger would not be a good selling point.

It is probably illegal (on the paper we have net neutrality, the telcos just blatantly break the law) to do so in Sweden which why some telcos are in a legal battle with our regulatory authority.

Heh, my cable TV provider in Mexico came with a remote control with a fat "Netflix" button on it for easy access.

While useful to people, most of whom want to just go to Netflix, that level of integration doesn't feel right.

It’s not illegal if you get user consent. I signed up (in Sweden) for a mobile contract with free Apple Music data last year, and they made a big thing of getting consent for them to do DPI to get that.

It’s actually somewhat of a grey area due to net neutrality regulations. Those are EU-wide, but up to the local regulation authority to interpret, which means that a regulator in Portugal or Sweden says it’s cool, in The Netherlands that any music service (sadly not your own Plex) can apply to be delimited, and in yet another EU country it might be completely illegal.

> There's nothing else comparable that can take its place.

Nothing that can replace WhatsApp? A simple messaging app like hundreds of others out there? If they shut down tomorrow I don't think anyone would be impacted. People would just switch to one of those. Nobody in 5-10 years would be like "I miss WhatsApp".

Is WhatsApps a money generator for Facebook? I would have thought it was just a service they bought to stop someone else buying it.

Not yet, they are obviously moving into merging WhatsApp with Messenger/Instagram Direct, but it looks like these recent actions against FB (US Congress questioning monopolistic practices, FB having promises it would not merge WhatsApp with FB Messenger at the time of acquisition, and various privacy investigations from EU countries) are making FB go very very slow on this.

Therefore, so far FB only collects contacts and improves its social network (in the technical sense) with WhatsApp.

They're trying to monetize WhatsApp through their Business API. They have a directory of Business Service Providers that can provide API access and integration services. Their partnership model is very convoluted and flawed, though, and it's hurting adoption.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/

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