The problem is there no laws to stop whoever becomes the lucky recipient of such a network effect from doing whatever they want.
Instead antitrust law needs to be expanded to consider network effect platforms like social network as monopolies on ways of interacting with their users, and restrict them from several behaviors like this one.
There's the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
> Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers. Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability of the new entrants to compete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Wording it a bit weird, though. "interconnect their networks with one another"? If whatsapp made their client authenticate with their services so that their servers only work with their client and vice versa, would waiting for requests from would-be competitors to give them special access be sufficient to comply?
I wish a law would force the use of an open protocol for all services. Let anyone make their client, and let those clients connect to any server.
Not using WhatsApp has consequences. We sometimes miss out on family events when people forget that we don't use WhatsApp. Anyone with children is basically required to use WhatsApp for communication with other parents, organising school and social events, and what have you. Refusal to do so means you ostracise your kids.
So yeah, great. To participate in some parts of society WhatsApp is now a de facto requirement. A whole nation blindly agrees to whatever terms of use Facebook drafts. And when you do accept those terms, you are forced to use their client software on one of their approved operating systems. Owning a (Android or Iphone) smartphone is a hard requirement.
The network effect means that alternatives never gain any traction, and the price of WhatsApp ('free') is hard to beat.
I'd like to delete WhatsApp, but any conversation I have in Signal vs WhatsApp is a small victory that I'll take. If at some point more than 50% of my messages are outside WA, I'll nuke it.
I'm definitely missing out on some interactions but at the end of the day, who cares? If it's really that important I'll get the message another way. I know it's the reality now that most parents/schools use WhatsApp but that's not a reason to not want change. Crucial information should be sent via email anyways.
I also think this is the only way to actually move off the platform. You can't half-ass it, because why would others move away when you're still available?
These days I am looking to rent a flat in India. It's a tough task for a bachelor here - add to that the fact that builders rarely build 1 bedroom flats.
So any broker I call simply tells me "WhatsApp me your requirement, budget, and details". When (sometimes) say "I'll SMS" the prompt response is "no no, WhatsApp". Most of them/us here don't check SMS - it's reserved for either spam or bank txn notifications and OTPs.
Same if you don't have a Facebook account. Speaking of which, WhatsApp was the defacto IM standard before it was bought by Facebook. Previously it was MSN Messenger (or whatever it is called these days. Skype?) and that was horrible as well. XMMP was at least federated, and had backwards compatibility.
The advantage WhatsApp has over MSN is that the data is E2EE.
There are some people who push for an alternative called Telegram, which uses home brew cryptography instead of established standards.
Though if I look at the Mastodon drama (recently posted on HN, apparently from 2017) federated in practice can lead to fractured communities. Heck, you can even see that in the history of IRC (how EFnet and IRCnet got started).
We could demand that all network protocols are fair game for reverse-engineering to enable interoperability. Or mandate public specs and save everybody a bit of effort.
But if it's my app —not the protocol or the service itself— that's generating revenue to pay for the whole thing (eg adverts), why is it fair to let people and other providers usurp that? What if I rely on a specific client setup for security (eg anti-cheat in multiplayer games)?
I do very much see your point about social colonies forming and creating their own localised monopolies, but I just cannot see a clean way to fix it. Do you?
If you have a monopoly then there are various restrictions on what you can do. Whatsapp is pretty much the way to communicate within The Netherlands. Other companies which have a monopoly and/or huge market share (e.g. 2 companies which each have 40% of the market). This e.g. resulted in KPN (ADSL/VDSL) being forced to open up their infrastructure.
I don't see how Whatsapp is earning money via their app, nor how that's relevant in case of a monopoly.
Facebook should have never been allowed to buy WhatsApp and Instagram - especially Instagram. It would've been so much better if Instagram got to be the main independent competitor (or even purchased by another company) to Facebook, than Facebook owning it.
Facebook will keep making tens of billions of dollars in the coming years, even if it's engagement drops - but Instagram may keep growing. So does that mean Facebook will be able to purchase future competitors to Instagram, too?
Screw that. It shouldn't be allowed. In fact, I think we need a law that says automatic anti-trust protection is activated on any company purchases over say $500 million.
Google should have never been allowed to purchase Admob, either. They almost rejected the deal at the time, but still ended-up letting it through. And of course all of these telecom mergers shouldn't be allowed either.
So, switch to something else and convince a few other folks to do the same (e.g. "I am not available on <whatever>, use <whatever++> if you want to talk to me"). Y'all were not always on whatsapp to begin with, so there's no reason y'all cannot leave.
This is not a monopoly, and monopolies themselves are not illegal. You mention antitrust laws but I am not sure what anticompetitive behavior is taking place here? The C&D itself is quite laughable, but speaking more generally, why should the network effect be regulated? Plenty of other communications networks are open, so any network effect of "walled gardens" ought to be attributed to the superiority of the product.
There are so many methods of communication available today, calling any one of them a monopoly is a bit absurd. You may not like what WhatsApp are doing, but that's not reason for more regulation...that's reason to switch products. But just because you don't like the alternatives isn't a valid argument for increased regulation.
So, when people evidently complain that they feel the social pressure to use the walled garden even though they rather wouldn't ... then that ought to be attributed to the superiority of the product?
Could you explain your reasoning behind that?
It's not though. Once you become big and have reached critical mass you can pull off quite a lot of mediocre/bad stuff. Fact is the majority of people simply do not care as long as the product still works (they might not even be aware there's bad stuff going on behind the scenes) - too much effort to find a suitable alternative, convince everyone else to go to the same platform and so on
Fortunately they added this statement because (IANAL) I believe those developers didn't perform any of the activities listed in the bullet points of the letter.
However all of third party WhatsApp automation is a gray area. Everybody knows that WhatsApp doesn't welcome it (I really don't know why) and they have the money to litigate, especially because no big business will ever build anything on the top of WhatsApp without a previous explicit consent. For example a bot API. I never understood why they didn't implement one. I hoped that after the FB acquisition they would, an exact copy of the Messenger one, but they still didn't. Now that all the founders left maybe things will change but I wonder what's FB's plan. WhatsApp is bigger than Messenger in many countries and with the EU stance against data sharing between the two companies I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger.
I think bot API exists but is only available to selected merchants. I get an automated ping on whatsapp from BookMyShow after booking a ticket with the ticket details.
PS - Has a mass migration of community from one product to the other ever been successfully pulled off?
You don't need to migrate anything on the short run. The Whatsapp classic experience will probably remain the same for those who prefer the lite messenger, with the added feature of linking a Facebook account and talking to those people too. The heavy and encouraged experience will be Messenger, that already scours the phone book of those dumb enough to use it, and is perfectly positioned to talk to Whatsapp clients.
The massive network effect this move will unlock cannot be ignored by Facebook. I'm sure Whatsapp's privacy features will suffer, but users don't value them.
Tencent did a reasonable job of migrating a lot of people to WeChat from QQ, but then again QQ is also still alive and used, so it wasn't a full/complete migration.
Not really if done right. Just let the human message first.
Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made.
But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps.
I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.
(And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard.
I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.
I remember the unofficial clients not being able to support the latest features, and being completely locked out as soon as a new major version of the mainline client being released.
All other protocols like ICQ, MSN, AIM were reversed so that you can use your Miranda/Trillian/XYZ, not what I would call "open".
However, after the recent news about spreading misinformation in India which did lead to injustices, I can see how bots may harm uninformed users more than it would help them.
Shame on WhatApps for not being able to provide an official, controlled automation solution.
> DirectChat is another useful application. It works just like Facebook Messenger’s chat bubbles but it supports a lot of different applications too. It feeds your chats into another window where you can then reply back as well. Its most popular usage was probably with WhatsApp.
I think the "Cease and Desist" letters are being sent because these two specific apps, unless there are others not mentioned by these article, are making use of APIs that are not directly part of WhatsApp but interact with it in a kind of direct way.
I wonder if the letters were sent directly to the developers or via Google Play.
The solution is easy. Facebook should remove the integration from WhatsApp. Problem solved. If you don't want other apps to extend your functionality, you should not integrate with other systems.
The reality is that when a behemoth like Facebook tells you to do something and that they know were you live (probably literally), your company is at risk independently of how crazy the claims are.
Corporations are the new big abusive government. But we can't vote them out.
WhatsApp/Facebook will then have to send C&Ds to hundreds of potentially anonymous contributors if they want any chance of taking the open-sourced app down.
The whole _point_ of implementing these APIs is to allow the user to reply using a different app; replies direct from the notification on the device itself are a hook to encourage developers who don't care about the rich integrations to allow that functionality anyway.
And that's one of the things I really like about Android: "platform" apps like WearOS don't use private APIs, they use public APIs so other developers can build on platform features. I have seven apps installed that ask for notification access, five I've granted.
