WhatsApp Tells UK Government It’s Still Not Willing To Undermine Its Encryption

The UK government is entertaining even more plans to undermine (or actually outlaw) end-to-end encryption. And it’s not gaining any support from the multiple services (and multiple people) these efforts would harm.

Both Signal and Proton have made it clear they’ll pull their services rather than weaken their encryption to comply with UK government demands. WhatsApp is saying the same thing — telling the UK government something it has already told it at least twice.

In 2017, WhatsApp made an unofficial announcement of its policies when UK law enforcement showed up with a demand to compel decryption of a targeted account. WhatsApp refused to comply and the UK government apparently decided not to press the issue. At least not directly.

Five years later, the UK government is still hammering away at encryption, adding more mandates to its steadily simmering Online Safety Bill. And WhatsApp told the UK government what it told it back in 2017: breaking encryption just isn’t an option. (In the form of a lawsuit challenging an Indian law, WhatsApp said the same thing to the Modi administration and its series of rights-violating internet-related laws.)

Another year has passed and the UK government still wants to get the Online Safety Bill passed. And, once again, Meta has surfaced to tell the government that it can pass all the laws it want, but none of them will force WhatsApp to undermine its encryption.

WhatsApp would refuse to comply with requirements in the online safety bill that attempted to outlaw end-to-end encryption, the chat app’s boss has said, casting the future of the service in the UK in doubt.

Speaking during a UK visit in which he will meet legislators to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, described the bill as the most concerning piece of legislation currently being discussed in the western world.

The UK government doesn’t have any leverage here. WhatsApp will simply stop offering its service in the UK. As Cathcart points out, 98% of its users reside in other countries. And there’s no reason it should put all of its users at risk, just because the home to 2% of its user base is being stupid about end-to-end encryption.

Now, that 2% would probably like to have access to an encrypted messaging service, whether it’s WhatsApp, Signal, or Proton’s offering. Unfortunately for them, supporters of the bill don’t want them to have these options. But that’s not going to work out well for the government. Angering constituents tends to shift the leverage back their way, which means legislators are pushing a terrible bill from a position of weakness.

The potential for hefty fines only makes it more likely service providers will exit this market rather than give the government what it wants.

Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to comply with without removing end-to-end encryption. If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.

If the options are providing a weakened service that harms all users or shelling out 4% of its income on a regular basis, the option these legislators failed to consider is really the only intelligent option: exiting the market.

And when that starts happening, the government is going to get an earful from the people it never bothered to listen to in the first place: domestic users of services these legislators are actively trying to destroy.