Why WhatsApp Is No Threat to Facebook’s Dominance
In 2012, antitrust regulators shrugged off a huge media merger. That was a mistake.
The illusion of choice.
Source: Photothek, via Getty ImagesI’ve been doing some reporting in the Caribbean and elsewhere abroad recently, which led me to begin using WhatsApp for the first time. In large swaths of the world, people use WhatsApp as their primary texting tool: It’s free, it’s fast, and you can send photos, videos and audio as well as text. And you can set up a chat room to foster group communication rather than just person-to-person texting.
The latter feature, of course, is the core of what Facebook Inc. offers its users. Indeed, the people with whom I’ve been texting on WhatsApp have told me that when they first started to communicate as a group three or four years ago, they relied on Facebook. They moved to WhatsApp because it worked better for them. It was easier to use on a smartphone, there were no ads, privacy was paramount, and the only way you could join the group was to be invited in — making it difficult for outsiders to penetrate. As a social media platform, it was useful to them in a way that Facebook no longer was.