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Comment by jkelleyrtp | Hacker News Reader

Why would breaking Facebook down and regulating them solve anything related to the global dependence on WhatsApp? Aren’t the only people who know how to run these services already running them?

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.

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It's strange that you're ignoring the massive area between "unregulated" and "nationalized" (which is where most companies fall already).

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.

In the tweet's case also, if Whatsapp were split from Facebook, Facebook's BGP failures wouldn't have taken it down, so the decentralization has robustness benefits even if you ignore the market benefits.

"The idea is to break up Facebook because they've been buying competitors instead of trying to compete."

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.

Plenty of utilities are privately owned - telephone companies and ISPs, for the most relevant example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

Privately owned does not imply privately run.

Are telecoms not privately run? Or are you defining anything that's regulated as "not privately run"?

Really depends who you are grouping into telecoms.

Comcast/AT&T etc are not utilities, nor are they classified as such.

If you regulate WhatsApp so that it has to be interoperable with other IM systems (similarly to how email or matrix work), then not everyone has to be dependent on WhatsApp.

>(similarly to how email or matrix work)

Or phone calls. There are tons of telcos and they are interoperable.

Exactly, protocols over platforms.

For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.) which result in resilience decisions:

* 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.

I'm confused - SMS and other telephone services already go down. Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable.

Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.

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.

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?

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...

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

No they aren't. There are hundreds if not thousands of competitors to these services. Infrastructure is just a web server. It is not similar to utilities like electric and water. They are built on physical cities which are controlled by the government.

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.

> 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.

> In some countries, WA is used by the government for communication between them and citizens.

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.

> It might work for utilities

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...

Because some people think government is the answer to every problem and if you just regulate Facebook and by law they have to have 100% uptime - then surely they will.

These are also usually the people close to government or in it unfortunately.

> 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?

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.

It would absolutely work. Just force them to divest WhatsApp.

This. The entire reason the acquisition was allowed was that it would remain independent. They lied about it so there's no need to honor that purchase. Divest immediately.

Also the author cites Palestinians and Israelis both relying on WhatsApp as justification for breaking down and regulating Facebook. Pray tell, if nationalized, how many nations would be impartial enough to let both sides continue to use such an (apparently) essential communication platform?

No one is proposing nationalizing WhatsApp or Facebook. I have no idea who you're arguing against, but it's not the author of this thread.

The parent comment spoke directly of nationalization. I was indulging their scenario, not seeking to argue with the original Tweet’s author or anyone in particular.

This would only make it worse. The reason barely anyone in my environment uses WhatsApp is because they don't trust them. I doubt they would trust the US gov more than Facebook, these days.

Facebook’s culture is “move fast and break things” the exact opposite of what you want from a utility used by billions every minute. Forgetting Facebook and insta for a second, WhatsApp really is the defacto phone and text service for many parts of the world: the taliban set up WhatsApp groups to manage things as they took over in Kabul.

Putting a little more maturity into their SOP isn’t the worst thing.

>move fast and break things

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.

Regardless; imagine your bank or the company that builds a bridge having "move fast and break things" engrained into their corporate culture?

If you want to be taken serious as a messenger app, you need to align your corporate culture and processes to reflect that.

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