I'm honestly shocked most sensible EU countries don't simply DNS block Meta at this point.
Last time WhatsApp was down for just a few hours it made international news.
Especially because WhatsApp _uses phone numbers as identifiers_. Switching to Signal or Telegram, which also use phone numbers, would be completely feasible: recreating the same groups would be the biggest annoyance, but you have all your contacts as soon as they install the app.
People will of course be very bothered by losing their chat histories (can you decrypt the backups it creates in Google Drive?), but it won't be an actual show-stopper. And it will teach a valuable lesson on relying on cloud.
I agree it's not great that this is all controlled by Meta but this is what it is now. It will take a long time, or some heavy nationalization, to fix the situation. This mentality of "let's break it and people will figure their shit out" is i.n.s.a.n.e.. You know that "move fast and break things" is a BAD thing when you're affecting the lives of so many, right?
For the sake of this argument, assume the premises that (a) Meta, a foreign corporation, controlling the private conversation of hundreds of millions of citizens is not simply "not great" but unacceptable, and (b) that it is necessary to put WhatsApp permanently offline (as opposed to making it somehow safer).
Steps to a post-WA transition:
(1) Publicly gather a list of messaging services that can be verified to satisfy the requirement to act as WA replacements:
- E2E encryption
- Interoperable under the Digital Services Act (critical)
- Phone number-based IDs
- Fully hosted in the EU and controlled by European companies
- Sufficient operational resources to serve > X number of users
(2) Mass send the message to all WA users "Due to new European privacy rules, WhatsApp will shut down on ${today + X months}. You will be able to continue talking with all your contacts through any of the following apps: [ list apps sorted by capacity, click to install ]. You will need to recreate any groups of which you are currently the admin.". Plaster the same message everywhere, send SMSs, etc.
Compared to switching to a whole new currency, or moving a shitload of bureaucracy fully online during Covid, this seems a very reasonable task for a European government.
The thing is most people would probably choose the wrong alternative, i.e. telegram, whose communications aren't endtoend encrypted by default, as a replacement instead of more decent alternatives. It wouldn't be a win over whatsapp.