[atomic77]

You raise some interesting points.

FB shelled out $15B for Whatsapp, and clearly the contents of these messages was a major factor in that valuation, especially once the subscription fee was phased out.

Now they're voluntarily encrypting. The only explanation I can come up with is that they are realizing that they will not be able to keep the contents of these messages for themselves in the face of motivated nation-state actors, and so they're killing that golden goose rather than share it. This seems pretty extreme and makes me wonder what is really going on behind the scenes.

My assumption is that there is a contingency to monetize metadata (something I'm not seeing discussed here too much) but I can't help but wonder if FB is now looking at the $15B as a huge overpayment.