[ih] deterioration of email (was Re: clever usc creation)

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dhc at dcrocker.net> said:
>I was intrigued, in Europe, to have someone say they would text me and 
>it turned out they meant Whatsapp.  (It was purely an accident that I 
>had whatsapp running and got their message.)

I'm not surprised.  WhatsApp is ubiquitous most places in the world other
than North America.

The obvious reason is price. SMS often has caps, and is charged per
message outside your own country (or the EU for EU residents), while
WhatsApp is free other than its trivial data usage.

Now that text messages on smartphones are usually iMessage or RCS, and those
can finally talk to each other, I suppose the price distinction goes away,
but since WhatsApp works, why change?  Also, the telco can read your SMS
but WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol so (unless Meta is lying) nobody
else can read your messages.

R's,
John