Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app. I would say the internet has brought a lot of positive things in my life so far. The open source movement we have today wouldn't really be possible in an offline world.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.
> I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
> one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
I sometimes think the Internet is like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It can show us what we want: if what we want is knowledge it will show us that, if what we want is proof that we are right it will show us that and if we want to see how horrible other people are, that is what we will see.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
I’m going to count HN as a social network. It’s one of my favorite places on the internet. It surfaces great content, and the comments are a gold mine of top-notch information and advice (by and large).
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
> I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result.
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
> Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
It does take knowledge to learn though sadly (and personal drive), I'm helping some family in an underdeveloped country and I stupidly want to be like "learn to code" but yeah... that doesn't really work. They have the time but not the ability to learn even though they have wifi/computer.
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
“ It's easy to feel blasé about the internet, but it's also played a huge role in making information easily accessible. I learned about electronics from online tutorials. Taught myself programming. Also learned a lot about home repairs and renovations. Made a lot of contacts, landed jobs, etc. I met my partner through a dating app.”
One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.
It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.
When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.
Yeah over the past few years this has been an issue I have found myself becoming increasingly passionate about. It's a particular problem of internet connected devices - in the past it was not really possible to own something which is acting on behalf of another party while it's in your possession, but that's exactly what corporate-owned operating systems do. And we haven't taken the time to develop legal frameworks around how that should work.
I think the core of the problem here is the free ad-supported model that's so pervasive in the industry. Data mining in order to optimize targeted ads is the business driver for this bad behavior and society has struggled to grasp it's implications.
The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able to survive and thrive in this model are the ones with the most data and the most socially exploitative techniques.
Lots of us are happy to pay for nice things like operating systems that don't use this model but there aren't enough of us to adequately fund such projects. We're just not a big enough market share.
Am also from that generation, but got into an IT career from the early 80s.
I understand where you're coming from. I'm increasingly the least-tech focused of my family/social circle, despite being the most heavily involved in the tech industry. In fact, I think my lack of bullishness in tech is due to the fact that I've been in the tech industry for 40 years. I know where the downsides lie.
However, don't let the current reality get you down. One thing that being in this industry has taught me is that nothing is completely fixed and permanent. To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
What wont change is the need for level-headed 'grey-beards' and those others who have lived sufficiently long in the tech space to have accumulated some level of wisdom, which they can then share with those that follow.
> To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
Why does there have to be a global monopolist though? I wonder if we ever will end up in that decentralised dream.
Let the sheep have their facebook apps. Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent. I have a dongle that plugs into my phone that can decode aircraft transponders, or tune any station on a wide spectrum, that cost less than a fancy coffee. Tech has brought many wonderful tools to those of us willing to learn.
Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.
> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.
And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.
Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.
Tempting. Sadly, if we let the sheep have their FB, the likely result will be that we lose whatever semblance of democracy we have left. Already we're down to one party that belives in free and fair elections. Our system depends on informed citizens, not massive authoritarian psyop experiments. The longer we go where the majority can't get overwhelmingly popular policies accomplished, the closer we get to turning to any strongman who promises bold action, no matter how nightmarish that would be for most people.
Sheep are interesting animals. I was in the Rockies last week, read a newspaper article about a female sheep who killed a bear who was threatening her children.
Temporarily shrouding oneself in Tor, DDG, VPNs, etc doesn't address the root problem: the commoditization of data. The next generations will have fewer and fewer tools to subvert the system. Real change will come from addressing the root problem rather than finding individualistic, temporary solutions.
The discussion environment is worse because there're more people online. Being online alone was a great filter for fruitful discussions.
At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)
There really is a gigantic portion of the population who seem to completely ruin everything they touch. It happens to everything that gains popularity. That root of the problem isn’t getting better.
Well as you get older, you are just more likely to be surrounded by the moan and drone crowd. Its just life.
Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.
It does, but it's different now. Back in the 90s people were excited by the tech, and the creative possibilities the tech afforded them. People would spend a lot of time making a website (home page) about their favourite thing just to tell other people about it.
That creativity still exists but now no one makes a site about their favourite things. Now it's pretty much always a play to get fame and fortune. If someone likes a show they have to "review" it to demonstrate their superior opinion that's worth subscribing to. If someone likes a game they start a channel where they play it live to an audience. If someone makes a game it's to try and make money through Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. Even the creative coding scene seems to have shifted to trying to sell NFTs rather than just being about making cool looking things with math.
The passion to make things is still there but the motivation has changed from the joy of sharing what you like making to trying to make money, and that has changed things quite considerably. I think it's had a chilling effect on what people are willing to share.
> Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe
Local monopolies rather than a global one.
What if there was a global, international messaging system available to everyone with a phone, that strove for five-nines reliability? And wasn't funded by advertising? And didn't deplatform anyone(+)?
Oh wait it's called SMS and everyone hates it, largely for good reasons. The internet has a lot of problems but it disrupted the telcos by being far cheaper despite using the same infrastructure while offering more capability.
I mean a reason SMS gets its hate is because the moment you send a message across international borders you start paying ridiculously large sums of money (compared to the amount of data transferred) for every single message. If you now take Europe for example where it's easy to have friends in another country that you talk to regularly and you can see why WhatsApp quickly gained in popularity there simply because it was the cheaper option.
I understand the feeling, but SMS really doesn't work. A the end of the day, it is just a hack on top of the telephone network.
There are countries were SMS is actually local to the carrier, and they don't route user messages out of their bounds. In the olden days it was fun asking people where they contract their phone to decide wether to mail them or message them.
Some countries have horrible reliability for SMSes, I think India is a famous one. Trying to do user auth over SMS becomes a nightmare.
Then the issues if you cross borders, where you'll be enjoying both countries SMS idiosyncrasies on top of the round trip costs.
Then carriers won't open SMS to non voice SIMs, even if they get an access to the network. But you'll need to meet specific criteria to get a voice enabled SIM.
All in all, it's a tried and true protocol in limited setups, but not something to hold as a global gold standard (I think there sadly is no global standard to hold on a pedestal...we can hope we make one in the future)
Tech enthusiasts never had the numbers to realize that world. It was the "It just works" users that determined how economic interest would shape the net in large parts.
That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.
I think you had wrong expectation. I was 11 in 2000, when I got access to the internet behind my parents' back.
I was surrounded with shady people, learned the darkest of the dark of humanity very young and never had any utopia: people are monsters, women are always men, help is never truly free etc. Im not sure how it was before the internet, but clearly I never had a view of it as an utopia: it s a jungle.
Facebook and opinion sharing network in general are not very important: if people could be Nazi in 1940, Im not sure why you think it's different or even facebooks fault: they simply reflect what we are.
And nobody want decentralization of power really. People want power centralized closer to them.
For one, I think the internet became better and cleaner with time. Or it s me who get trapped a lot less.
Facebook and other social gardens took the Star Trek out of the internet
In a related thought that'll probably be when the next big internet wave happens - spaceships and colonies offline-first until a data sync drone flies by
>Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
Not out of necessity. It's not as if any one corporation controls the internet and has a monopoly on mobile communication the way JP Morgan used to control the railroads. Plenty of options to text and communicate other than through Facebook exist. People are dependent on one specific app because they choose to be, not because they have to be.
And "sizable portion of humanity" is overstating it. For the vast majority of humans, this was a non-event, or at worst, a slight annoyance.
People always had the option to avoid JP Morgan’s network of rails by walking or using a horse. But of course that’s silly to say. JP Morgan had built the one and only network. It was the fastest and easiest way to move goods and people so that’s what people “chose” to use. They “chose” it over options that vastly inferior. That’s what a monopoly is.
And I would encourage you to think about the long-term implications of monopolies. Specifically when it comes to inequality, inefficiency, and opportunities for innovation. The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
Same. I started online in the late 80s with something called Wired Writers - we shared stories online with famous writers who critiqued us. At the time I didn't think much about it (I was a kid) but it was sponsored by an oil company. Now I think about it a lot. I went on to digitize libraries, set up university databases (Silver Platter etc). I think about how my nieces don't know that internet that we saw. It is because the form of our society does not allow decentralization. This censors the content. I think about that.
I remember the late 90s a little differently. At least in the USA, it was a time where most people used centralized networks like America Online and Compuserve, and instead of websites, brands would direct you to their AOL keyword. Everyone was concerned about the centralization of power, but there was a lot of hope about the possibility of decentralized information. AOL lost its power in the begenning of the millenium, but it was quickly followed in popularity of other centralized networks like MySpace. Meanwhile, the decentralized networks only continued to grow along with them.
Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.
> I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
Thanks for making me feel depressed right in the morning.
I was just cogitating this morning on how the internet is also drifting towards centralised infrastructure. The mesh is becoming a star. It may be more efficient to stick a tube in my body to feed me. I am not sure this is progress however. In the same way "easy" communication and infrastructure may not always be progress.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
I would argue that the internet has been very good at decentralizing power. The problem is that this is what decentralized power looks like. There are a seemingly infinite number of groups flexing their collective muscle, generating their own realities, and even their own economies.
I get that the rich have gotten richer and corporations have gotten bigger, but in so many ways their power has decreased. We live in a world in which the most important force in modern American society is freaking 4Chan (QAnon). The billionaire class has lost the thread on how to control this. They try to put the squeeze on the Facebooks and Youtubes of the world, but that seems to have little effect on the spread of very insane but incredibly meaningful movements.
I some times wonder if the mistake we all made was thinking decentralizing things was a good idea.
This is not surprising in the historical sense. "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu shows how this repeatedly happened to industry after industry, with every disruptive comms technology bringing about a stage of unfettered, ebullient, and at times reckless innovation, followed by consolidation, monopolistic behaviors, and finally regulation where the govt essentially creates inefficient but necessary safeguards against otherwise monopolistic, predatory, large companies. It happened with radio, television, landline telephony, mobile telephony, Internet, PC OSes, mobile OSes, social networks, and it is not over. It is the natural tendency of capitalistic markets with network externalities. The saving grace of it is, and that looks rather unusual from the historical perspective, there is still a relatively effective notion of net neutrality (Chinese firewall excluded). This means it is possible for an upstart like TikTok to effectively challenge incumbents like Facebook or Snap in a way that competitive telcos never could have 30 years ago (they really needed govts to crack monopolies open).
Optimism about new media tech doesn't survive long when average humans get their hands on it. It's all fun when it's computer enthusiasts only, but when FB or Twitter makes it so even the least considerate, most highly misinformed, and most toxic individuals can reach hundreds of others...that's the other tail of the distribution, that's the snake oil salesmen, conspiracists, religious fanatics, assholes, jerks, and all the people we used to go online to avoid.
Tech is having a negative impact on the elites, which is good. In the past they could basically get away with saying whatever they wanted unless another elite wanted you to hear otherwise. Now when $politician posts something on Twitter there is a regular person calling them out on their bullshit right underneath within seconds. They are working hard to re-cork this bottle with censorship and such, but I don't think that will happen in most places.
I wouldn’t put nails in the decentralization coffin yet. The Internet isn’t really that old, and it’s a complex topic.
Technical platform decentralization is hard for technical reasons and the Internet may indeed contain a bias against it, but physical decentralization (telework, geographic diaspora) is a decentralization prediction I see starting to happen.
Physical decentralization was underway before COVID. The pandemic just accelerated the trend by years.
> where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world.
The point is that this was never true. Well for me as a person with strong technical background it used to be true. But for many "regular" people not so. And when the usability and difficulty was lowered for the others, it was no longer feasible to self-publish websites.
> in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!)
I was in the same framing of age and schooling as you describe, and in an affluent area as well; perhaps the difference between your technology classes and mine was that mine were not "ham radio oriented".
The problem is that these corporations don't pay correct taxes and corrupt agencies don't do anything about it. This is causing centralisation as they have huge competitive advantage over honest businesses.
> In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
The tendency towards centralization (corporate or state, doesn't really make a difference) is because of three things:
1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.
2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.
...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?
3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.
Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
I know it’s hard for a lot of people but why do we automatically blame everything on Facebook?
The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app was installed in: Calls and texts?
Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? Instead of demanding Facebook be responsible for everything?
We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah". As late as 2005 I was paying AT&T ~$9/minute to call my family abroad and up to $1 per text. If it weren't for tech companies like Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/Google I have no doubt that would still be the case today.
>We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah"
1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.
2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.
> This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist
Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp.
The demand is to not make Facebook responsible for everything. They shouldn't be in charge in what's ostensibly a public utility for most of the planet.
Calls can be listened to and texts can be read by Governments. In my opinion that's unlikely to change so there will always be a good reason to use apps like WhatsApp or Signal for communication.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why is the conclusion in that tweet "the billionth reason to break down and regulate Facebook" rather than "the billionth reason not to use whatsapp as the de facto phone and text messaging platform"?
I use Signal as much as possible, but here in Brazil it seems WhatsApp/Facebook has some deal with all the cellular operators by which the a) give customers "unlimited WhatsApp usage" that doesn't count against their 3 or 5 GB/month internet usage quotas, and b) give WhatsApp traffic preference when their networks are congested, meaning that sometimes Signal messages don't get delivered immediately but WhatsApp messages do. Really.
The "unlimited WhatsApp usage" as part of a basic plan alone means that Signal doesn't have a chance. Most people hit their quota limits during a typical month, and that means no more Signal messages/calls.
I worked at WhatsApp until 2019 and worked on technical stuff for the WhatsApp part of the zero-rating deals. Part A is definitely part of that, but AFAIK, your part B, network prioritization was never part of the deal.
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.
additionally, android builds are also often shipped by OEMs to randomly kill apps running in the background, with an exception for whatsapp but not other messaging apps like signal and telegram
and irc folks have splintered now to irc4ever hardcore, matrix preachers, mastodon tooters, other small social media jesuses and so on. oh, and discord lunatics. Can't wait for that walled garden to crash.
Good thing is that there are choices.
Bad thing about the good thing is that there are too many and we're stretching thin.
How on earth is government intervention the answer to Facebook being down? How are these two things even related? What a bizarre place we’ve arrived at.
Supposing FB and Whatsapp are splintered when FB goes down then people will still be able to use Whatsapp. When Whatsapp goes down people will still be able to use FB.
Both my mobile and ISP have gone down over the years many times more than fb, and often for much longer (last year it was a solid week), and I live in one of the most connected points on the west coast.
> the billionth reason not to use whatsapp as the de facto phone and text messaging platform
Serious question, what do you suggest the general population should use? Something that still works on a 5-year old Android phone with no software updates in the last 2-3 years (at least), all free of charge.
Why is the attitude so prevalent in 2021 that the market is always the answer and regulation never is?
Every high-functioning society is built on a foundation of sensible and fair regulation. Over the past 30 years, we've seen a rise in truly transformative web technologies, and mostly we've left it up to the market to see what would happen. And what has happened has not been universally good. When will we decide it's time to regulate these tech firms?
I despise the company that Facebook is, and hope that it crashes and burns in ignominy such that by comparison we remember AOL fondly.
That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize f*cking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility? Then we'll be stuck with it for-goddamn-ever
Let's stick to principles, enforce existing (or write effective) anti-monopoly, consumer- and data- protection laws.
And, I'm fine with taking the karma hit if even one person hears this: You. Yes, you, reading this. Stop bitching about Facebook and delete your account. We as a society can neither build nor evaluate anything better while you, and yes, I mean you, you specifically, reading this, use Facebook. Especially when you rationalize it by reference to the fact that everyone else is on it. Kick that crutch out from under yourself and learn how to keep in touch with friends, family and that cute barista without compromise. Delete your account.
> That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize fcking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility?*
The govt is attempting to regulate Facebook by breaking it up, not by centralizing it. Facebook is guaranteed to maintain its market share if it can continue to buy and operate competitors.
agree, there is only one stab at the vampire, and it better be the right instrument at the right place
imho its the freaking business model that is the core of the problem. everything else (monopoly, poor regulation, dark patterns etc) are things the world has seen before, again and again
but we have never (in recent times) seen such amoral political and market endorsement of what is essentially a dehumanizing societal regression: they treat their (largely unsuspecting and ignorant or captive) human users as classifiable, data minable, bidable data objects. Nothing good will ever come out of that. This is a practice that simply has to be tarnished as contravening basic (digital) human rights and incompatible with any society that has any pretense to cohesion and fairness.
NB: they are neither the first nor the only ones following this heinous business model but their are its single most effective promulgator
I think the point of breaking down Facebook into smaller entities is to reduce centralization of operations, and thus the impact of single-point failures. The same conclusion should be made of a giant state-owned company.
Well the 2003 Northeast blackout was started by a power utility in Ohio, and took out most of the north-east USA and even Ontario -- making it an international outage.
The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).
There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.
Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.
The premise of this question is that we know how often a power outage in Nebraska was caused by a power outage in New York. We don't know, and the conclusion should not be that it is not that often, but that we do not know.
If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent.
>I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.
Social media and messenger communication should be based on common protocols allowing different networks and services to be connected. I should be able to message you on your application from my different application because neither are walled gardens and are under-pinned by a common protocol. I can phone anyone on any network anywhere in the world or email them regardless of their provider. This has to be no different.
Hardly a new idea, and I know such things exist in embryonic form, but it really seems like the only future I would want with regards to these technologies. Obviously the barriers to this are immense, how would you get Facebook to let go of its walled garden? This will kill a lot of businesses.
I'm not saying it's likely to happen but I still think we must strive for something like this. It wouldn't stop profitable products from being built but they would be equivalent to email clients. Obviously far less profitable than owning that user and their data. The social good that would come from this though would be immense.
"You have built, bought, or maintained a product which is vital to billions. It's a free service unavailable 0.01% of the year. For this you must be punished."
Whatever you think of Zuckerberg, Ayn Rand, or politics, it's unquestionable that Zuckerberg and Facebook have built, bought and maintained useful services used by billions. That's literally what the featured tweet is complaining about - Whatsapp is so crucial for so many it's like a utility.
I don't think the point is being made from the standpoint that facebook ought to be punished, but from a more pragmatic one that no one private entity should be in control of something so vital
Shhhhh on HN you can't have independent thought, your hive mind has to hate Facebook for every incident even if it makes no technical or logical sense.
The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app.
It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have less.
It's like no one here has ever run a server and understands how hard not having down time is, so has to bike shed ohhhhh Facebook bad because of some other incident. HN really has a low technical knowledge base.
This is a clever troll. It's so full of ignorance I thought of reporting as a troll, but that would only serve to validate one of your false claims that one can't have independent thought.
The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit.
Government intervention, so the theory goes, could mandate a market or set of chat protocols that prevents a single operator from dominating the chat sphere via network effects or by technical operation.
Does it matter? It is an app built by a dude. Facebook found value in it and invested. They can shut it down completely and no one has any right to stop them from doing it.
Readit News
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
When it comes to all the toxic things that social media can bring, I think we're slowly learning about them as a society, and maybe that's a good thing? Maybe we can develop healthier forms of social media.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but I think reddit is basically the anti-twitter, and is a lot less toxic as a result. On twitter you have a one-to-many broadcast system where one person can have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers that basically encourages flamewars, short inflammatory comments. On reddit, you can get high karma, but everyone basically has an equal shot at writing a popular post, and negative comments tend to get downvoted. Clearly, some patterns lead to more or less toxic and hateful interactions. We should study and learn from them, and use that knowledge to design better social media platforms.
Of course, this completely depends on where you are on both Twitter and Reddit. There are bad and toxic parts of Reddit, and there are good and wholesome parts of twitter.
The one main difference though that's useful to compare between the two is that a post escaping the original audience, with the context collapse and everything else that brings, is a foundational feature of Twitter. It's a lot harder for that to happen on Reddit.
Honestly you just described reddit, too, except of course for the follower count—but the point is that reddit doesn’t have to have that many participants in a discussion thread for it to reach a level of toxicity same as Twitter.
Sure, social media did make information more accessible, but the vision of the internet before Web 2.0 was that it’ll democratize information without the trade off that comes with social media today—because that trade off is exactly what we hated then about the status quo.
It was just that people turned out to value less truth less, than being told they were right. You can fault the engineers who built this for it, but then you are faulting them for thinking too highly of people.
What general principles can we learn from HN that can be applied elsewhere? Does HN self-select its audience? No profit motive? Great moderation? (Thanks Dang!)
Sounds like "let's develop a healthier form of crack" to me.
That entirely depends where you are. The big frontpage-able/default subreddits are strongly moderated (with at least some pressure on the mods to behave), but other subreddits have ended up as self-reinforcing cesspools, especially when moderators collude to ban any opposing viewpoint (as happens with r/conservative). And then you have the subreddits that were explicitly created for toxic purposes (e.g. T_D, c..ntown, fatpeoplehate, and a boatload of others listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...).
I run a few social sites, nothing as major as Facebook, and this is something I struggle with daily. The problem isn't the tech, it's the people.
They post disinfo? So you put up a little warning saying this is wrong, they get upset and scream censorship, you push too hard and they just go to another platform.
People like being upset, they like having drama.
I have no answers, but I do think a friends-only feed, where you have to expressly opt-in to see posts works best, combined with easy discoverability (hashtags, interest channels and pages etc)
Anyway I too learned from the web and it has benefited me a lot.
All of this was possible before the internet.
One thing that adds to this feeling for me, is that any device I own that has an OS, unless that OS is Linux, feels distinctly hostile. I can't own a handheld computer that's not trying to enmesh me in an "ecosystem" of some sort, curate my options without my consent, do god-knows-what in the background, brick itself on a timer, and the list goes on.
It's even worse with laptops and desktops, unless I'm willing to devote big chunks of my dwindling free time to making a hobbyist OS (which, to be fair, is a breath of fresh air when it works) behave.
When even the terminals to our increasingly-hostile internet are themselves hostile, it makes me dream of just walking away from it all that much more.
The problem is that once something is free there's no going back. You'll never be able to compete with free. Free is the new antitrust. The only players that will be able to survive and thrive in this model are the ones with the most data and the most socially exploitative techniques.
Lots of us are happy to pay for nice things like operating systems that don't use this model but there aren't enough of us to adequately fund such projects. We're just not a big enough market share.
I understand where you're coming from. I'm increasingly the least-tech focused of my family/social circle, despite being the most heavily involved in the tech industry. In fact, I think my lack of bullishness in tech is due to the fact that I've been in the tech industry for 40 years. I know where the downsides lie.
However, don't let the current reality get you down. One thing that being in this industry has taught me is that nothing is completely fixed and permanent. To wit, the global monopolist who benefited the most from the network-effect lock-in used to be IBM. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Facebook. In time, this too will change.
What wont change is the need for level-headed 'grey-beards' and those others who have lived sufficiently long in the tech space to have accumulated some level of wisdom, which they can then share with those that follow.
Why does there have to be a global monopolist though? I wonder if we ever will end up in that decentralised dream.
Those "sheep" (i.e. people who aren't crypto-nerds) are the people I mainly want to communicate with.
> Modern tech has also brought us strong open source tools. We have stronger encryption in any linux distro than any army had in the 90s. We have communication pathways (Tor) that defeat censorship. I can send an email today, encrypted then sent via Tor, that no government can censor, read or even detect that I have sent.
And those pathways are almost never used, except by people who have an unusual interest in the pathways themselves and people who want to use them to do ignoble and illegal things.
Also, those technologies aren't as powerful as you think they are. Any major government that cares to detect and block them can, and if they want to find out what you sent they can always hack your endpoint or beat you until you tell them. China is the proof of concept for that.
At least we have Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, which fit the vision of "tech utopia". It would have been great if there's more stuff like that (I left out the vibrant open source landscape, because it also sort of existed in the 90s, in a (way) smaller scale though.)
Upto you to get out of that space now and then. Go watch the communities where kids are developing games, unity, webgl, godot, twitch streamers, VR/AR etc etc. That same energy and excitement of the blog and website era still exists.
That creativity still exists but now no one makes a site about their favourite things. Now it's pretty much always a play to get fame and fortune. If someone likes a show they have to "review" it to demonstrate their superior opinion that's worth subscribing to. If someone likes a game they start a channel where they play it live to an audience. If someone makes a game it's to try and make money through Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. Even the creative coding scene seems to have shifted to trying to sell NFTs rather than just being about making cool looking things with math.
The passion to make things is still there but the motivation has changed from the joy of sharing what you like making to trying to make money, and that has changed things quite considerably. I think it's had a chilling effect on what people are willing to share.
You mean centralized proprietary platforms where they get monetized doing this.
Local monopolies rather than a global one.
What if there was a global, international messaging system available to everyone with a phone, that strove for five-nines reliability? And wasn't funded by advertising? And didn't deplatform anyone(+)?
Oh wait it's called SMS and everyone hates it, largely for good reasons. The internet has a lot of problems but it disrupted the telcos by being far cheaper despite using the same infrastructure while offering more capability.
There are countries were SMS is actually local to the carrier, and they don't route user messages out of their bounds. In the olden days it was fun asking people where they contract their phone to decide wether to mail them or message them.
Some countries have horrible reliability for SMSes, I think India is a famous one. Trying to do user auth over SMS becomes a nightmare.
Then the issues if you cross borders, where you'll be enjoying both countries SMS idiosyncrasies on top of the round trip costs.
Then carriers won't open SMS to non voice SIMs, even if they get an access to the network. But you'll need to meet specific criteria to get a voice enabled SIM.
All in all, it's a tried and true protocol in limited setups, but not something to hold as a global gold standard (I think there sadly is no global standard to hold on a pedestal...we can hope we make one in the future)
That said, the classical internet is still there, it just isn't as buzzing as social media. I really appreciate that.
I was surrounded with shady people, learned the darkest of the dark of humanity very young and never had any utopia: people are monsters, women are always men, help is never truly free etc. Im not sure how it was before the internet, but clearly I never had a view of it as an utopia: it s a jungle.
Facebook and opinion sharing network in general are not very important: if people could be Nazi in 1940, Im not sure why you think it's different or even facebooks fault: they simply reflect what we are.
And nobody want decentralization of power really. People want power centralized closer to them.
For one, I think the internet became better and cleaner with time. Or it s me who get trapped a lot less.
Dead Comment
In a related thought that'll probably be when the next big internet wave happens - spaceships and colonies offline-first until a data sync drone flies by
Designing for offline is designing for cool
Not out of necessity. It's not as if any one corporation controls the internet and has a monopoly on mobile communication the way JP Morgan used to control the railroads. Plenty of options to text and communicate other than through Facebook exist. People are dependent on one specific app because they choose to be, not because they have to be.
And "sizable portion of humanity" is overstating it. For the vast majority of humans, this was a non-event, or at worst, a slight annoyance.
And I would encourage you to think about the long-term implications of monopolies. Specifically when it comes to inequality, inefficiency, and opportunities for innovation. The negative externalities go far beyond “a slight annoyance”.
Maybe the mistake was thinking that the Internet would either be centralized or decentralized, that one model would win in the end. The large organizations never gave up, but the small networks didn't either. There's no meaningful end to depth of the current Internet, and the decentralized part is larger than ever. Even Gopher space has continued to slowly grow. Maybe the only thing we lack is curiosity, and that's easy to rediscover.
Thanks for making me feel depressed right in the morning.
If it makes you feel any better, it's not exactly just about the internet or what we modern folk consider contemporary technology. The question of societal transformation to a place where technical knowledge (in a broad sense) has become a requirement for basic living and the side effects or unintended consequences that it entails have been on the minds of philosophers since the industrial revolution. People have notice that the reliance on "machine" is going to change their world similarly to how the internet changed our 80s and 90s world.
Two very interesting things I'd recommend reading for a different way of framing this issue (but from the same perspective) that's been helpful for me. Both by Jacques Ellul. First is "Technological Society" 1954, and second is "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" 1962. The second one might not seem related, but it is.
I get that the rich have gotten richer and corporations have gotten bigger, but in so many ways their power has decreased. We live in a world in which the most important force in modern American society is freaking 4Chan (QAnon). The billionaire class has lost the thread on how to control this. They try to put the squeeze on the Facebooks and Youtubes of the world, but that seems to have little effect on the spread of very insane but incredibly meaningful movements.
I some times wonder if the mistake we all made was thinking decentralizing things was a good idea.
Technical platform decentralization is hard for technical reasons and the Internet may indeed contain a bias against it, but physical decentralization (telework, geographic diaspora) is a decentralization prediction I see starting to happen.
Physical decentralization was underway before COVID. The pandemic just accelerated the trend by years.
The point is that this was never true. Well for me as a person with strong technical background it used to be true. But for many "regular" people not so. And when the usability and difficulty was lowered for the others, it was no longer feasible to self-publish websites.
I do still have high hopes for IPFS and Matrix
I was in the same framing of age and schooling as you describe, and in an affluent area as well; perhaps the difference between your technology classes and mine was that mine were not "ham radio oriented".
Not that I'm disinterested.
It’s funny how obvious it is with hindsight, that there could be downsides to this
I completely disagree.
Corporate power changed, and sure, companies like Google and Facebook probably hold more power globally than companies in a single country.
But, individuals have gotten more power also. People can be more informed, and affect more change than they could previously, which is both a good and bad thing.
Manipulated.
1) Economies of scale for machinery (in this case, computers, routers, etc.) Nowadays, Facebook and Google are laying their intercontinental fiber optic cables. Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon. Decentralized can't compete with that.
2) Economies of scale for user networks. In Monthly Average Users we trust. Maybe a Mastodon instance works out for a small group of like-minded tech-literate friends. Realistically, small platforms just can't compete without growing into large platforms. Even in the naturally-decentralized blog space, medium and substack dominate.
...hey Carl, substack and tiktok are new upstarts, how did they compete with centralized giants?
3) Economies of scale for attention. Advertisements these days are pretty compelling. UI is important for online platforms to get mass adoption. Both of these things need capital to build out, and benefit tremendously from scale.
Add these things up and there's no surprise the masses gravitate towards centralized services, especially since they've figured out a business model that's free and "just works" for the non-technical user.
Dead Comment
The inaccessibility to WhatsApp completely brings life to a standstill for a lot of people across the world. Isn’t that more of a failure on the part of the governments, people and companies that exist there? How is a app that needs access to internet somehow a bigger necessity than the basic function of the device the app was installed in: Calls and texts?
Shouldn’t we focus on making those services accessible and affordable? Instead of demanding Facebook be responsible for everything?
1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.
2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.
This. If calls and international calls were acessible, whatsapp wouldnt exist
Whatsapp offers a whole lot more: read receipts, group chats, images and video, voice notes, location sharing, a web client (albeit a quite limited one), and it has a generally pretty good UX/UI (much better than Androids stock messaging app). Regardless of the economics, on a technical level calling/texting isn't competitive with Whatsapp.
But let's be real here, Facebook is also marketing WA as a better alternative to sms, mail etc.
So if Facebook wants to position WA as critical communications infrastructure, they should maintain it as such.
The US gov obviously had and likely has access to the WhatsApp infrastructure
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
Or phone calls. There are tons of telcos and they are interoperable.
* 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.
Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.
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.
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.
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...
These are also usually the people close to government or in it unfortunately.
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.
Putting a little more maturity into their SOP isn’t the worst thing.
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.
I use Signal as much as possible, but here in Brazil it seems WhatsApp/Facebook has some deal with all the cellular operators by which the a) give customers "unlimited WhatsApp usage" that doesn't count against their 3 or 5 GB/month internet usage quotas, and b) give WhatsApp traffic preference when their networks are congested, meaning that sometimes Signal messages don't get delivered immediately but WhatsApp messages do. Really.
The "unlimited WhatsApp usage" as part of a basic plan alone means that Signal doesn't have a chance. Most people hit their quota limits during a typical month, and that means no more Signal messages/calls.
I'm sure it's similar in many other countries.
Facebook does a lot of network peering though, and has PoPs in Brazil, so there's some potential that Signal goes over transit and WhatsApp goes over peering, but peering is not (or was not, when I was there) a requirement for zero rating. I think AWS may peer in Brazil as well?
WhatsApp likely works better than Signal on congested networks because of the protocol design, timeout length, and DNS fallbacks. These are things Signal could improve on. If your network is so congested that packets are delayed 30-60 seconds and DNS always times out, I expect WhatsApp to still work, but not a whole lot else. That's solvable for other services, but it takes time and determination and accepting the use case as valid and important. Of course, all that and WhatsApp was still inaccessible for a significant amount of time today.
I'd like to use irc as a messaging platform, but almost noone uses it anymore. If all your friends and family use only whatsapp, you have no choice.
Good thing is that there are choices.
Bad thing about the good thing is that there are too many and we're stretching thin.
Serious question, what do you suggest the general population should use? Something that still works on a 5-year old Android phone with no software updates in the last 2-3 years (at least), all free of charge.
Every high-functioning society is built on a foundation of sensible and fair regulation. Over the past 30 years, we've seen a rise in truly transformative web technologies, and mostly we've left it up to the market to see what would happen. And what has happened has not been universally good. When will we decide it's time to regulate these tech firms?
Dead Comment
That said, I'm utterly alarmed by calls such as this to "regulate" Facebook. We really want to legitimize f*cking Facebook like that by nationalizing / turning it into a utility? Then we'll be stuck with it for-goddamn-ever
Let's stick to principles, enforce existing (or write effective) anti-monopoly, consumer- and data- protection laws.
And, I'm fine with taking the karma hit if even one person hears this: You. Yes, you, reading this. Stop bitching about Facebook and delete your account. We as a society can neither build nor evaluate anything better while you, and yes, I mean you, you specifically, reading this, use Facebook. Especially when you rationalize it by reference to the fact that everyone else is on it. Kick that crutch out from under yourself and learn how to keep in touch with friends, family and that cute barista without compromise. Delete your account.
Thank you for listening.
The govt is attempting to regulate Facebook by breaking it up, not by centralizing it. Facebook is guaranteed to maintain its market share if it can continue to buy and operate competitors.
imho its the freaking business model that is the core of the problem. everything else (monopoly, poor regulation, dark patterns etc) are things the world has seen before, again and again
but we have never (in recent times) seen such amoral political and market endorsement of what is essentially a dehumanizing societal regression: they treat their (largely unsuspecting and ignorant or captive) human users as classifiable, data minable, bidable data objects. Nothing good will ever come out of that. This is a practice that simply has to be tarnished as contravening basic (digital) human rights and incompatible with any society that has any pretense to cohesion and fairness.
NB: they are neither the first nor the only ones following this heinous business model but their are its single most effective promulgator
There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.
Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.
The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).
There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.
Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.
If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent.
>I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.
Hardly a new idea, and I know such things exist in embryonic form, but it really seems like the only future I would want with regards to these technologies. Obviously the barriers to this are immense, how would you get Facebook to let go of its walled garden? This will kill a lot of businesses.
I'm not saying it's likely to happen but I still think we must strive for something like this. It wouldn't stop profitable products from being built but they would be equivalent to email clients. Obviously far less profitable than owning that user and their data. The social good that would come from this though would be immense.
2. Facebook purchased WhatsApp to remove competition and options from its users.
And more https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/facebook-...
The Tweet is a good reminder how Facebook is a utility and more than a 'fun' app.
It's nonsense to then go it needs regulation due to this outage. It's obviously unintentional, and as you point out, outages are rare and it would be unlikely any government would have less.
It's like no one here has ever run a server and understands how hard not having down time is, so has to bike shed ohhhhh Facebook bad because of some other incident. HN really has a low technical knowledge base.
The point ideologically is that society should not be so dependent on one private company. Government is regulated by the people and serves the public interest. Facebook serves only itself and profit.
Government intervention, so the theory goes, could mandate a market or set of chat protocols that prevents a single operator from dominating the chat sphere via network effects or by technical operation.
Whatsapp was not built by Facebook, it was purchased.