Funny week to be Mark Zuckerberg. Wednesday he publishes this long, kind of rambling blog post about how Facebook is turning over a new leaf and going all in on privacy — encrypted messages, everything interoperable across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, messages that dont sit on a server forever. And then this morning Elizabeth Warren drops a Medium post with a plan to literally break the company into pieces. Two completely different visions of "fixing" Facebook, landing two days apart. I dont think thats a coincidence and I dont think Zuckerberg thinks so either.
I read the whole privacy post last night (its long, give yourself 15-20 minutes) and my honest reaction is: I dont buy it. Not because encryption is bad, encryption is great, I want it. But the timing is too convenient. Facebook has spent basically two years getting dragged through Congress, through the UK Parliament, through a never ending string of stories about what got scraped and by who. Cambridge Analytica was a year ago almost to the week. And now, right as regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are openly talking about breaking the company up, Zuckerberg announces hes going to weld WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger together into one encrypted plumbing system. If you make three products into one product, its a lot harder to break that one product into three later. Thats not a privacy strategy, thats a moat.
Warrens plan, for anyone who hasnt read it, basically says: unwind the big acquisitions (Instagram, WhatsApp, and on the Amazon/Google side, similar stuff), and stop letting platform owners also compete on their own platforms. She actually rolled it out with a town hall in Long Island City tonight, which is a detail I love, because thats exactly where Amazons HQ2 was supposed to go before they pulled out a few weeks back after all the local backlash. Standing in the neighborhood that just told Amazon no thanks, announcing a plan to break up Amazon. Somebody on her team has a sense of humor, or at least a sense of theater.
I'll say the quiet part: I use Messenger every day and I use WhatsApp maybe twice a year to talk to one relative overseas, and the idea of those getting merged under one hood doesnt thrill me even with the privacy wrapping paper on it. More consolidation, dressed up as more privacy. I've been annoyed at having three separate DM apps on my phone for years, sure, nobody enjoys that. But "we solved the annoyance by making the underlying company even bigger and more tangled together" is not the fix I was hoping for.
None of this is really new territory if youve been reading this blog a while — I complained about the acquisition itself back when Facebook bought WhatsApp for something like nineteen billion dollars in 2014 and said then it was going to end badly for anyone who liked WhatsApp being small and boring. Five years on, feels like Ive been proven right in the most roundabout way possible.
Small unrelated thing from today: the Galaxy S10 actually went on sale, first day you could walk into a store and buy one instead of just preordering it. I havent touched one in person yet. Everyone I know who preordered is very smug about the in-screen fingerprint sensor, which apparently works about 70% as well as they were hoping, based on the two people I've badgered about it so far. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but also not nothing.
Anyway. Two big companies, two totally opposite prescriptions for what ails big tech, same week. I know which one Zuckerberg is rooting for, and it isnt the one from the senator holding a town hall a few blocks from the Amazon site that just fell through. Worth keeping an eye on which one actually goes anywhere over the next year, because my guess is the answer is neither, and Congress just argues about it until everyone gets bored and moves on to the next scandal.