Cloudflare and Whatsapp are not comparable. The relationships are different (CF provides hosting for individual businesses or services, Whatsapp facilitates person-to-person communication), the switching costs are different (most or all CF customers can on a reasonable time delay switch to a different provider with 0 downtime, while 'switching' away from whatsapp requires moving your entire social graph to a new app), and the impact of an outage is different (some or all CF-based services are degraded/down vs you can't communicate with anyone from your social graph unless you can reach them on the phone or in person)
Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.
> Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
I agree with this. However, I completely disagree that we should "break down and regulate Facebook". We already have gazillion alternatives. And it's up to governments and people themselves to use them. This accident is a great reminder that people should have an alternative.
Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way.
There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.