WhatsApp's newest update will only leave customers feeling disgruntled
A corner of your online social world will soon get a little more annoying. Meta says it is going to cram more advertisements into WhatsApp, although not directly into our private chats. Instead, a new tab will appear on the smartphone app, which businesses will use to push paid messages, according to the US tech giant.
Fair enough, you might think. The app is free to use, generating a huge amount of consumer surplus, but still costs Meta money to run, particularly with 1.5 billion of us now using it to share videos and make calls. Meta has struggled to monetise WhatsApp since Facebook, as it was, acquired it for $19 billion in 2014, or $42 per user, back when far fewer people used it. Facebook also had to settle out of court with BlackBerry, who alleged that the company had stolen its innovative messaging technology. So it must do something.
But getting something for free is a very mixed blessing. Since we're not actually paying customers, we can't take our money elsewhere. The competitive dynamics that spur product improvement are absent here. Think how little Instagram or YouTube have innovated, unless faced with competition from a TikTok or a Snap. It took Facebook a decade before it allowed us to change the default WhatsApp wallpaper from green – which is more time than it took for America to send a man to the moon.
WhatsApp has previously angered users with its new AI feature which it previously described as 'entirely optional' – even though it cannot be removed from the app.
The Meta AI blue circle with pink and green in the bottom of your chats screen can't be suppressed. It triggers a chatbot designed to answer questions, but it has drawn criticism from users who don't want it and cannot remove it.
WhatsApp performs a basic communications utility, and would have been one if not for the remarkable stupidity of the incumbent telecommunications companies. Even when privatised, these giants retained the risk averse mentality of the state owned telecoms they once were. They reacted with suspicion to 'over the top' internet services like WhatsApp and Skype.
Even though their engineers were building an all-internet core, the beancounters and executives couldn't let go of their legacy business models, which racked up lucrative profits from termination fees, video charges and picture messages. Once they decided they had to compete with OTT services, they couldn't agree how to. So instead of making a little, indirectly, they got nothing. And they must still carry all the traffic we generate, to boot.
The absence of digital property rights also means we can't price our personal data – and with no free market where it can be traded, the price is set by the incumbent middleman, which is Google and Meta.
So don't grumble when you see an ad pop-up when you're in a chat – that's what a broken market looks like, run by tech giants who have become as complacent as the telecoms they usurped.
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