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For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.)
by leokennis 5y ago
For one thing, many governments will have laws about availability of key infrastructure (roads, snail mail, 4G and 5G, wired internet, financial services etc.) which result in resilience decisions:
* Have at least 2 or 3 mobile networks; if 1 fails, people can still dial 112 (911) over the remaining one(s)
* If banks break down, you can still withdraw up to €xyz from an ATM during the emergency
* Even if all mail isn't delivered on all days, letters from the government or letters announcing someone died are still delivered
* If a city is "serviced" by two highways they can't both be closed at the same time
* Etc.
In some countries, governments (or utilities etc.) use WhatsApp in critical processes and communication. So just like the things above, WA should be considered in these contingency plans. Stuff like:
* WhatsApp cannot be the only contact info agencies have - they need at least a backup contact method
* Facebook should announce maintenance activities to WA to these governments in a standardized fashion
* Facebook has to commit to keeping (the main functionality of) WA free of charge
* Etc.
If Facebook doesn't want to commit to stuff like that - fine, but then the consequence should be that WA is no longer considered a valid tool for critical communication, as Facebook then clearly sees it as a "hobby app" that can go down for hours without real consequence.
With great power comes great responsibility.
- madeofpalk 5y agoI'm confused - SMS and other telephone services already go down. Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable. Arguably the regulation of "classic" telephony services is what lead to the innovations of Whatsapp and everything else.
- hansel_der 5y agothis likely depends on the point of view. ie. if you count the offline hours of all telcos vs. whatsapp, sure wa comes out on top. but from the perspective of an individual, the availability of wa is far lower than that of my mobile phone network.
- leokennis 5y agoWhen had all sms or phone service in your country gone down? Sure a carrier might have issues - but there are other carriers who can pick up the load and there are likely government contingency plans for just that situation. Same doesn’t apply to WA.
- madeofpalk 5y agoIf my carrier goes down, it doesn't help me I can't just switch at the drop of a hat to another carrier who is still up. Likewise, when Whatsapp goes down I can still talk to people on iMessage or Discord or SMS.
- leokennis 5y agoWhat I’m talking about here isn’t my WA group chat with my soccer team. I’m talking about 911 being reachable, or about government communication with its citizens etc. For these bigger use cases, there are contingency plans. For example, 911 will remain reachable via other carriers for you even when your carrier goes down. For some governments, WA is in the critical path for these use cases. And you can’t route around WA as it’s one product by one company who is the sole maintainer of it.
- madeofpalk 5y agoWhat country uses WhatsApp for emergency services??? That sounds like a terrible idea completely independent from Facebook Corp. Critical emergency services still have the plain old telephone services to use, no?
- lorenzobr 5y agoThe sms and phone service infrastructure is more centralised than you might think and carriers probably have less redundancy than big tech when it comes to it. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-text-message-delay-explanation-sms-syniverse-carriers https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/21/20974692/valentines-day-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customers-unable-to-get-online https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...
- vadfa 5y ago>Regulating something doesn't make it more reliable. In my experience, it makes it less reliable, since that service will no longer have to compete with anybody else.
- elliekelly 5y agoWhy would regulation mean no longer having competition? There are lots of highly regulated industries with lots of fierce competition.