It used to piss me off now I despise it.
Another massive problem is if Meta has a fit with your organization, they can ban you from using WhatsApp for Business. All these Latam countries should and must pass regulations to avoid this kind of behavior. Free market all you want but if you captured market, it’s the nation’s responsibility to ensure their people can get the best service even if these companies are hating each other.
None of those are national security issues though, they’re QoL issues. The problem isn’t WhatsApp owning the market, it’s governments making the choice to only make their services available through WhatsApp and providing no alternative of their own to receive services. Every single “WhatsApp is too dominant” story I’ve seen usually boils down to governments acting as enablers for the supposed issue themselves.
You don't think WhatsApp for some reason stopping to work and airlines losing their default way to issue tickets is a national security issue? How about health care appointments with national ID and address on them being sent as PDFs and stored on Meta's servers? All of those are massive national security issues for me. It can grind the country to a halt for days on end.
There's a reason South Korea has laws requiring all data on its citizens and geography to be stored in Korea. Even Google Maps doesn't quite work in Korea.
South Korea is not a great example here. It's been weeks since the big data center fire and they've barely started to recover. Storing all data internally can really backfire if best practices aren't being followed, and that's a lot more likely with a not-invented-here approach.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20251009/rec...
Why are they running everything through WhatsApp in the first place with no alternatives? Using WhatsApp as a convenience is fine, but if you’re doing it with no way to not use WhatsApp or obtain data through an alternate mechanism other than WhatsApp, that’s what is causing your problems.
Issues that threaten national security are issues that threaten a nation’s sovereignty, put it at risk of war, or compromise the security of high ranking politicians, members of a nation’s intelligence service, military assets, and other issues of that caliber. The potential to miss flights or health care appointments does not rise to that level, but if it’s an actual problem, then it’s something solvable without reaching for the anti-monopoly gun or national security gun and a good start would be governments not using WhatsApp as an exclusive mechanism for obtaining government services. The second step is governments mandating that businesses in healthcare or transportation and other such critical industries have alternative mechanisms for customers to reach them other than WhatsApp.
Of course they are. It’s basically foreign soft power infiltration, invasion, control, and conquest. WhatsApp is Meta, Meta is deeply associated with not only the US government and its agencies, but the various entities of state control in the subordinate countries that believe they are being provided a means of controlling their countries, but do not realize or are deliberately subordinating themselves to the empire that is called America.
The pernicious thing that neutralizes many people like yourself, is that you cannot understand that meta/Facebook/WhatsApp is not just innocuous private business somehow magically different than the government in which at least you have a theoretical level of control over in a democracy.
Every place that an “American” company controls aspects of a technology inside a society is effectively to that degree conquered by the “USA”. One’s own country simply does not exist anymore to the same qualitative degree that it is controlled by foreign technologies/companies. That is also the revealing argument the system made when it threw its fit about the Chinese control of TikTok! So at least the “American” system believes it… “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
> The pernicious thing that neutralizes many people like yourself
I get exactly how people view private American companies abroad and that’s irrelevant to what I actually said.
Why are governments running all their communications and services through a private American app? Even in America, we’re not doing that, and there is always a fallback in some form of the telephone system, email, the postal service, the web or just showing up in person for anything that is absolutely essential. If I’m doing anything through a 3rd party app like WhatsApp instead, it’s either not that essential, or I’m doing it as a convenience but the fallbacks are always there.
So when people are talking about utterly essential services being run through WhatsApp and only WhatsApp, that seems like the obvious problem, because if that’s true, that’s also very stupid, and also a very stupid choice. Facebook profits from the situation, you could even say America profits from the situation, but you can’t say it isn’t without mutual engagement and compliance on the part of the supposedly aggrieved parties here.
I'm a capitalist but yes when national security is in play "free market" in my book doesn't apply. You can't have health appointments, airline tickets, government services by default on WhatsApp. Most don't even bother with email and just default to WhatsApp.
It was kind of the same but not as pervasive with Facebook Messenger in the Philippines.