So this week everyone's been glued to the Amazon-MGM story (eight point something billion dollars for a studio best known, as far as I can tell, for James Bond and old Rocky movies) and the crypto market doing its usual gut-punch routine. I don't have much to add to either of those, you've read ten posts about them already, probably from people who understand market cap better than I do. But there's a smaller story from this same stretch of days that I think matters more, and it's gotten buried: WhatsApp is suing the Indian government.
On May 26th, WhatsApp filed a suit in the Delhi High Court challenging India's new IT Rules, the ones that took effect that same day after a three-month compliance window. The part WhatsApp is actually fighting is the "traceability" requirement, a rule that would force messaging platforms with more than five million users to be able to identify the "first originator" of any message, on demand, if the government asks. WhatsApp's argument, and I think it's the correct one, is that you cannot build that capability without breaking end-to-end encryption for literally everyone on the platform, not just the person the government is curious about. You either keep a message history mapped to senders at scale, for hundreds of millions of users, or you don't. There's no halfway version of this that keeps the encryption meaningful.
I'll admit my feelings about WhatsApp as a company are complicated. Back in January, when they pushed that privacy policy update about sharing more data with Facebook, I did the whole thing everyone else did, downloaded Signal, told my group chats I was "moving," and then quietly never actually left because getting my mom and my uncle onto a new app is its own multi-week project I did not have the energy for. So I'm not exactly a WhatsApp loyalist walking around defending its honor. But this specific fight isn't about WhatsApp being good or bad. It's about whether a government gets to demand a backdoor dressed up as a compliance requirement, and once that backdoor exists for one government, it exists as a template for every government that wants the same thing next.
What's frustrating is how little attention this is getting relative to how big a deal it actually is. A messaging platform used by something like 400 million people in India alone just told a national government, in court, that it would rather fight than comply with a specific piece of its own law. That's not a small thing. It's also not a clean underdog story, since Facebook (WhatsApp's parent, in case you'd forgotten given how separately they market the two) said in the same breath that it intends to comply with the rest of the rules, grievance officers, monthly compliance reports, all of it, and is only drawing the line at traceability specifically. So it's a targeted legal fight, not a company storming out of a country.
I keep coming back to how weirdly quiet the discourse around encryption has gotten. A few years ago this would've been the main story on every tech site for a week. Now it's competing for attention with Elon Musk's Twitter feed moving crypto prices around and a streaming company buying another streaming company, and it's losing. Maybe that's just what 2021 tech news looks like now, everything's about markets and platforms, and encryption fights read like a rerun of an argument we already had. I don't think that's right. I think this is the argument, just happening somewhere most people aren't looking.
No neat wrap-up here, honestly. This is going to drag through Indian courts for a long while, and I don't think either side backs down easily, the government's got a law on the books, and WhatsApp's got hundreds of millions of users it can't afford to lose credibility with on privacy, of all things, twice in one year. I'll try to actually follow this one instead of letting it drop off my radar the way I usually do with legal stories that don't resolve in a week.