By now there have may have been about as many words written about this week’s blockbuster technology deal – Facebook’s $16bn-plus acquisition of the WhatsApp messaging service – as there have been dollars spent. The tech chattering class and the jealous masses are speculating wildly, even as Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum hold pretty close to the vest their long-term plans, discussed over years’ worth of coffees and long walks and dinners.  But there’s got to be more to this partnership than a shared goal “to make the world more open and connected”, right? Koum has long been an evangelist of free speech, while Zuckerberg has said recently that he wants to “build great new experiences that are separate from what you think of as Facebook today”.  Indeed, from those billions of words emerge some early clues about the future of a very rich Facebook, which suggest even bigger changes to the future of what we hold in our hands. Not all of them are so utopian.  There is a new currency we might call Zuckbucks, and which might as well have Zuckerberg’s picture on it, representing Facebook’s almost unique advantages and needs. It’s not a limitless fund; the WhatsApp deal represents about 10% of the company’s market capitalization. But it’s ample enough, coming from the cash and stock coffers of an operation that will do just about anything to a) buy dominance of a growing mobile market, especially outside the US, that it doubts it can dominate on its own; and b) prevent said markets from getting dominated by Google or Apple or one of the few other companies aspiring to take over the world.  The $4bn in cash was easy enough; Facebook’s public stock sales, plus surging profits, covered that handily. And the $12bn stock it handed out, which might bump up to $15bn in payouts to WhatsApp employees, was even easier. If Facebook’s value rises, both companies’ shareholders will be happy enough; if it falls, WhatsApp’s founders and investors will still have made absurd amounts of money while Facebook will have paid less. Plus, Zuckerberg has stacked the deck in ways that assure he’ll control Facebook no matter who owns which shares down the road.  So you have to ask yourself: what’s next on Facebook’s big-ticket shopping list? Yelp? Netflix? A mobile handset company? Your guess is as good as mine at this point, and Zuckerberg may already be sharing his wife’s chocolate-covered strawberries with that company’s founder, too. But his next acquisition is bound to be something that, like WhatsApp, can reinforce Facebook’s monopoly goals by adding a feature or service that looks like a budding monopoly of its own, and which comes with a staggeringly valuable social graph, which in this case is WhatsApp’s database of users’ phone numbers, user names, contact lists and locations. The bought-out swears it wasn’t collecting those for anything other than your own good. With the buyers at Facebook, don’t be so sure.  The current Silicon Valley tech bubble - if you can call it that - is still inflating, and this deal will only make it expand. But if you look at a lot of the recent success stories in the startup world, you see a trend of sorts. Founders are building companies that they and their investors can’t help but view, at least in part, as desirable features for the big guys – Facebook, Google, Apple et al – or as bait for “acqui-hires”, wherein the buyer wants the founding team more than the product they built. (Again, the WhatsApp founders have vowed to maintain their no-advertising stance, even after selling out to a company that lives or dies on ads. But let’s be real: Facebook plus WhatsApp equals Facebook.)  Koum and Co were insisting as recently as last month that WhatsApp had absolutely no intention of selling, because they were building a real business. And that was true, in a way: unlike so many of the other startups I’ve been watching lately, they were getting hundreds of millions of users - and fast - all of whom were willing to pay a modest fee ($1 after a free first year) for a service that had been costing them a relative fortune to maintain. You can build real businesses on that idea, but that kind of model is also what makes startups so attractive to the big kahunas who can wave even bigger checks.  To be sure, the biggest losers in this deal are not Facebook’s rivals in the tech world. They are the beyond-greedy mobile telecommunications carriers that have been extracting ridiculous amounts of text-message cash from their customers in recent years. A quote widely attributed to former Vodaphone CEO Chris Gent accurately holds that SMS is “the closest thing to pure profit ever invented”.  Just as internet-based voice calling forced down the price of what we used to call “long distance” phone calls, the carriers have seen internet-based services carve away at messaging. WhatsApp was widely seen as the best in breed: close to free, mostly reliable and more flexible (if problematic) in its security and privacy. The carriers’ current text and multimedia messaging users are surely people who haven’t bothered to seek out alternatives - or else who’ve forgotten to remove messaging from their bucket of services.  But as others have pointed out already, just because WhatsApp was exploiting a weakness in the overpriced schemes of your cellphone plan doesn’t mean your carrier doesn’t have a network to sell. Until its all-or-nothing power erodes - or gets one-upped by a truly disruptive company - the telecom industry will remain the true monopoly of our increasingly mobile future.  However wonderful this buyout may be for Facebook and WhatsApp and the holders of inflating stock in new-bubble startups, and however tough it may seem for the telecoms in the short run, this just isn’t a good deal for users of communications in the long-term. Facebook is simply not a true friend of the open internet, because its goal, as stated by Zuckerberg himself, is to become what amounts to a public utility, like the electric company - only with all of your personal information in hand. And the thing about utilities is they are natural monopolies or, because of government policies, don’t have real competition.  Apart from security and privacy issues serious enough to make anyone just finding out about the company more than queasy, WhatsApp is terrific if you want to communicate with other users of the same software, which at least runs on all major mobile platforms. The main value the telecom carriers bring to messaging, meanwhile, is that a text sent by one carrier’s customer to another carrier’s customer will, undoubtedly, arrive.  If Gmail users could only send email to other Gmail users, and my Thunderbird desktop email software could only send to others using the same package, email would soon turn into a monopoly controlled by one company. The open internet created email standards that were available to everyone, and the monopoly never had a chance to happen.  This is a debate that continues to play out at large - the FCC is debating net neutrality in light of the disastrous Comcast-Time Warner bid - but we need competition and cooperation among messaging app developers, too.  Maybe this is a job for the free and open source software communities, and I’m sure some projects are already under way. (I’ll be looking for them now). I can promise this: I’ll like any product that honors the values of the open internet and doesn’t try to trap me in its own ecosystem. I’ll even pay for it.
Dan Gillmor: What’s Facebook really up to? Same thing Silicon Valley does with every big deal, people: try to take over the world