What actually needs to happen is a proper federated system (akin to the existing telecoms system) that is regulated in the same way worldwide. XMPP is great. It should have ended up being the new SMS in my opinion, but telcos wouldn't have been able to make money off it, so it never happened. Enter Apple with imessage. The game changed somewhat. But it still left the Android gulf.
If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap phones in 3rd world countries).
I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the bigger picture. How would you police a free service with hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation? How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.
If Apple and Google sorted things out message-wise (can't see this happening) we might get there, but then you're still left with the billions of people that have simpler phones that use whatsapp because that's all they can actually use (whatsapp became prolific because of its tiny J2ME roots on tiny cheap phones in 3rd world countries).
I guess I was trying to point out that you need to look at the bigger picture. How would you police a free service with hundreds of millions of users without a shitload of automation? How would you pick the "innocent" people out very very quickly by using a human to review, given there are probably hundreds of thousands of such requests a day? It's not an easy problem.