And the most likely way it would have done this without Meta would be building its own personal social networking service that competed with Facebook and Instagram, Hemphill says, since this is how messaging apps in other countries monetized. Boasberg brought up testimony we’ve heard that WhatsApp’s founders were resistant to this kind of pivot, but Hemphill says that they still had investors and employees to answer to who would eventually want a payout. Plus, he says, Meta eventually was able to convince them to monetize the app somehow.