The issue isn't that I can't use SMS without paying. Even if I am willing to pay, it does me no good if none of my friends are using it because they're all only on WhatsApp themselves.
Everyone with a phone still has access to SMS. Your personal choice is not Meta’s problem, nor does meta have a monopoly on communication. No one, especially in developed countries, is forced to use meta services. There are many alternatives. I use iMessage myself which is great
It's not just my personal choice. I can't choose to use SMS to communicate if the people I need to talk to don't also make the same choice. And iMessage falls back to SMS when you send messages to people who don't have it.
Remember when Nestlé gave new mothers free trials of baby formula, that lasted just long enough that they'd stop producing breast milk? Was that okay too, since the mothers could have declined but made the personal choice to accept?
It’s a bad analogy because in this case, the alternatives never went away. If you don’t want to pay for a service upfront with money, you need to pay for it with ads on the service provider’s terms. That is your personal problem stemming from your personal choices. There are alternatives.
They are alternatives because your friends can also switch services. The problem is that you are not willing to pay either money up front or with watching ads. That is not a meta problem, that is problem with your personal preferences no matter how you want to spin it. There are many alternatives available right now and they didn’t disappear like your bad analogy. What you’ve written is clearly disingenuous because you’re not willing to pay for SMS, which everyone including your friends still has access to. It’s not fair to blame meta for that
