To honest, I think this is probably the begining of the end for Facebook. I foresee that they'll be forced to reduce services in Europe repeatedly. It'll be interesting to see what takes its place.
It might be the bigginning of the end of Facebook dot com, but Facebook as a company I feel will be here for a while. Facebook used to just be Facebook dot com but they've since become almost a tech conglomerate. The big tech firms are basically just holding companies for all the stuff they've acquired over the years.
they'll end up preying on the people in 3rd world countries that don't have strong privacy legislation. Same way as Phillip Morris did with cigarettes...
A similar example is sending garbage to China. At a certain point China stopped accepting it. Hopefully soon others will do the same and recycling will be tackled correctly.
The network effects has its limits. Messengers and social media platforms have so far resisted a winner-takes-all situation. Since social networks are still more often than not rooted within geographical boundaries, it's possible for competitors to coexist on a global level.
It'll be definitely interesting to see what Facebook is going to do if one of those bills that would require it to federate and/or provide an open API gets passed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.