The answer suprised me: “I use WhatsApp as the official channel with ministers, parliamentarians, journalists and other policy wonks and for keeping track on leaks and ‘public’ gossip, I use Twitter”. I was invited to a dinner in Westminster once and asked one of the other guests to explain how day-to-date policy advising worked in government. I have no ability to connect with WhatsApp users by using a different service (as everything is proprietary). WhatsApp (and other end-to-end-encrypted-messaging platforms) suffer from the problem that they are designed on a closed protocol, which - while providing amazing network effects while they scale - are also their achilles heel. Despite these differences, I can write you an email and have absolute confidence that it’ll be sent (and received) despite the differences between the hardware, operating system, software provider and email platform that you use. In fact, you might even run your own mail server and not reply on a 3rd party to deliver your email. You and I likely use very different email providers. Nearly half a century later - and it still works like the day it was new.Īnother example is email. I have a 1970s rotary-dial phone which I use in case of power outages (where we live, that’s a regular thing). For good reason too- our faith that the system will work relies on our faith in the protocol, and it’s held up for a long time. In fact, in many cases it’s illegal to connect equipment that doesn’t comply to the standards - and even more so to tamper with equipment that does. The telephone network has a protocol as its basis a common standard specification that as long as equipment connected to it complies with - then it will play fair with the rest of the network. To explain, think about some other mass communications systems and how they operate.
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