Wouldn't a company such as WhatsApp (Facebook) drop the Belgian user base in a heartbeat if they would actually be confronted with a law like this? My guess is they would much rather lose a few million users than having to deal with the bad publicity and the intrusive technical challenges that come with a requirement such as this.
I totally agree that it's probably worthwhile to implement some country specific logic for a user base of that size and ad revenue per user. But specifically with regards to this, I really can't imagine they would agree to do this. Suppose they do, it's probably not a bad guess that they would lose more users globally due to the bad publicity it would generate than they would lose by cutting off Belgium.
On the technical front, your examples are good and valid, but they seem like features that are pretty straight forward to feature flag per country. Something like disabling end-to-end encryption looks a lot more intrusive to me (without being a subject matter, feel free to correct me). Whatever WhatsApp built, they built it to enable end-to-end encryption on a global scale, to enable anyone from around the globe to send an encrypted message around the globe. Poking a hole in that seems non-trivial.
As a Belgian I guesstimate that WhatsApp has more than 80% of IM market share here.
> it's probably not a bad guess that they would lose more users globally due to the bad publicity it would generate than they would lose by cutting off Belgium.
But this is what all the tech companies do in China.
I don't think its hard to "defend" complying with the Belgian government that faces a terrorist network and drug cartel problem bigger than any other 1st world country (in relative terms).
> Poking a hole in that seems non-trivial.
They operated without E2E for many years though. I doubt that non-encrypted chat is even revoked.
And even if they pulled, there's many alternatives available. It's not like Belgium is worried about Meta's revenue.
Meta doesn't operate in China though, for not wanting to comply with their requirements of state-controlled censorship. I could see them applying similar reasoning here on principle (my god, I just used 'Meta' and 'principle' in the same sentence, I must be high). Another tech company might jump in that hole of course.
With regards to E2E, I wonder how it would work when you want to chat with someone outside Belgium though. If I'm the person outside Belgium, I wouldn't want E2E to be disabled just like that. And if WhatsApp can only be used between Belgians, that's quite a hinderance.
Belgium doesn't care about Meta revenue and rightly so, but if a law would be the reason that Meta pulls the plug on Belgium, that seems like a cause for a possible serious political backlash.
I wouldn't give FB/Meta _too_ much credit. I'm pretty sure they would comply with China's regulations if they were able to. It seems much more likely that FB cannot effectively moderate the amount of content people post and cannot comply.
For your second point, to me that's the same kind of feature work GP was talking about: Just add a little UI that says "Hey, you're speaking with someone in a country that doesn't support encryption. Your messages are unencrypted".
Also agreeing with GP, screw Meta! As a Belgian I could care less about one company when it comes to the rights and laws of my country. They can definitely make suggestions like everyone else, but they also need to follow each country's laws like everyone else.
