How does the author come to the conclusion to break Facebook down and regulate it after the outage ?
There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.
There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.
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.
Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.
The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun).
There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina.
Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.
If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent.
>I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.