What lesson are they supposed to draw from this? WhatsApp is free, popular and end to end encrypted. There is only one app that meets all those criteria, which

What lesson are they supposed to draw from this? WhatsApp is free, popular and end to end encrypted. There is only one app that meets all those criteria, which is the one we're talking about. WhatsApp is probably not that expensive to run but it's also not free, and acquiring the company certainly wasn't. So Facebook have found a way to combine end to end encryption with an ad-supported business model: use the social graph data and business integration to improve FB ads. To me this seems like pure win: Facebook already had ads, so it's just a matter of them getting better. WhatsApp can be free for everyone in a sustainable way, instead of the western-iOS-users-get-to-pay-for-everyone model WhatsApp used before. The habit EU governmental bodies have developed of constantly threatening internet companies whenever they change their products is meanwhile turning into noise: any impact it could have had has been lost because these cases are so often frivolous and/or can't actually demonstrate actual harm to anyone. More and more it looks like EU governments simply like bashing American companies, which probably looks free to them: free money and free voter love from the socialist side of the spectrum. Going back to the question of what lesson to draw from this: there IS a downside, which is that in future tech companies will prefer not to set up offices in Europe at all, but they can't see that. "Set up shop and avoid punishment by being good" is no option because these judgements are so often extremely vague, unpredictable or simply contradict the need of a business to generate revenue to sustain itself. BTW good luck charging Germans for WhatsApp given how few of them have credit cards.