European regulators have approved the Facebook WhatsApp acquisition a few months after regulators in the U.S approved the deal.
The social media giant confirmed the approval of the deal on Monday. The deal also cost the company an extra $3 billion because of the increased value in Facebook's stock of late.
"WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO. "The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable."
While regulators in Europe did approve the deal, a number of European telecom operators were opposed to the deal, saying that is would give the social media giant too much power and control over users' data.
Despite this opposition, regulators found that the two were not close competitors.
"Despite the fact that Facebook Messenger is a standalone app, the user experience is specific given its integration with the Facebook social network," said the European Commission, adding that users use the app in different ways.
Facebook paid a total of $4.49 billion in cash and 178 million of its shares to WhatsApp in the acquisition. In total the deal is worth around $21.8 billion. WhatsApp founder and CEO Jan Koum will serve as a director at Facebook and similar to Mark Zuckerberg, will be paid $1 per year. He will, however, also own 24.9 million restricted Facebook stock units, currently worth around $1.9 billion.
Currently WhatsApp has over 600 million users and is growing in numbers. An interesting thing to note about the European Commission giving the acquisition the go ahead is that it came with no strings attached, unlike the approval from regulators in the U.S. The Federal Trade Commission issued a letter to both Facebook and WhatsApp warning the companies to abide by privacy promises that they have made to consumers or face a hefty penalty.
"WhatsApp has made a number of promises about the limited nature of the data it collects, maintains, and shares with third parties - promises that exceed the protections currently promised to Facebook users," said director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, Jessica Rich. "Further, if the acquisition is completed and WhatsApp fails to honor these promises, both companies could be in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act and, potentially, the FTC's order against Facebook."
WhatsApp will continue to operate as it has and the company and its 70 employees will remain based in Mountain View, California.
