The Merging of our Digital World … A Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Do you worry that our digital world is now being run by run a few companies? Google owns YouTube and Adsense, Facebook owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Microsoft owns LinkedIn and GitHub. And so when companies start to merge the companies that they own into a shared platform, some people start to worry about anti-trust practices.

And so it has happened… Facebook now wants to rewrite the code around WhatsApp and integrate it with Instagram and Facebook Messenger. This is article is based on speculation, and there is currently no details of the methods that Facebook in integrated the packages. What is known is that Facebook bought WhatsApp for its customer base, but is stuck with end-to-end encryption and where it cannot mine user interactions.

It ends up with a Catch-22 situation. Users like the lack of adverts, but Facebook perhaps needs them in order to gain value from their investment, or at least want to share the meta data on their customers across the companies they own. At this point, there are no details on where in the tunnel that Facebook might punch into (or if it does at all).

The spin is that all three apps will come together onto a single messaging system — which makes sense — but this may give an opportunity for Facebook to rewrite the code and break into the tunnel. At the…