A look at allegations in Texas AG's antitrust suit, accusing Google of giving Facebook special privileges in exchange for not supporting a competing ad system
if you back up WhatsApp in Google, Google scans it. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...? Chris O'Brien / @obrien : Breaking: Yelp issues statement in response to state AGs' lawsuit against Google: Fuck, yeah! Johnny Ryan / @johnnyryan : Para 141 of Texas AG filing against Google & Facebook is incredible: Facebook gave Google access to people's end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files. I want to see the text of that deal. Was it in US only, or EU too? https://courtlistener.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing is the opening move of what became a multi-year legal arc: within a month, reporting detailed the guaranteed auction win percentages Facebook extracted from Google, and by early 2022 court documents alleged Zuckerberg and Pichai personally approved the secret 2018 deal. The suit's core claim is that Google bought off a would-be rival to its ad auction rather than compete with it.
The most explosive allegation is collateral: per Johnny Ryan's reading of paragraph 141, the deal allegedly gave Google access to end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp backups — messages, photos, videos, audio — meaning the ad pact may have doubled as a data-access agreement. That reframes the suit from an ad-tech pricing case into a privacy one.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook now face a state-level antitrust challenge alleging they suppressed a competing ad system through a privileged partnership, putting both companies' ad-auction practices under formal legal scrutiny.
- Facebook's privacy positioning takes a direct hit: if the alleged WhatsApp-backup access clause is real, the company that markets encryption as a user guarantee was simultaneously negotiating it away.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and advertisers who were allegedly told inflated stories about ad pricing — the subject of the state AGs' separate pricing-misrepresentation claims — gain leverage to demand auction transparency and audit rights from Google.
- Other state AGs and federal regulators have a template to copy: a documented quid-pro-quo between two dominant platforms is easier to litigate than diffuse market-power arguments, inviting parallel filings against both companies' data-sharing deals.
Third-order effects
- If courts treat platform-to-platform data access as a tradeable antitrust asset, encrypted-communication products lose their ability to promise privacy independently of corporate partnerships — pushing regulators toward mandating disclosure of what interoperability and backup deals actually expose.
- The pattern points toward structural unbundling of ad-tech stacks: suits built on internal deal documents make 'neutral auction' claims untenable, pressuring Google toward separating the auction from its own buy- and sell-side tools.
The trend: Antitrust enforcement against big tech is shifting from market-share arguments to forensics on specific inter-company deals, where a single contract clause can indict both competition and privacy claims at once.