EU Commission Moves to Stop Meta from Banning Chatbots on WhatsApp

Report from Wall Street Journal

In Brief – The European Commission has informed Meta that it plans to block the company’s ban on third-party AI chatbots from operating over WhatsApp. The antitrust regulator has reached a preliminary finding that Meta’s policy could unlawfully leverage its dominant position in messaging apps to gain an unfair advantage in emerging AI chatbot markets. Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera said swift action is needed because AI markets are evolving rapidly and the WhatsApp policy could cause lasting harm to AI chatbot competition in Europe. The interim measures would require Meta to maintain third-party AI assistants’ access to WhatsApp’s Business API under the terms that existed before the company announced changes to the WhatsApp Business Solution Terms in October that effectively banned general-purpose third-party AI chatbots assistants starting in January. Meta has repeatedly rejected arguments that WhatsApp’s Business API is a key distribution channel for AI chatbots, noting that consumers have many alternative ways to access them.

Context – Regulators who are sympathetic to chatbot operator complaints highlight WhatsApp’s strong position in the market for messaging apps, while Meta argues that its chatbots hold very small shares of the AI chatbot market. For example, Chat-GPT has approximately an 80% market share in the EU and it is even higher in Brazil, while Meta’s chatbots market shares barely register. The European Commission was the first regulator to act, opening an antitrust investigation in early December. In late December, the Italian competition watchdog ordered Meta to suspend their policy in Italy while it carried out an antitrust investigation. In mid-January the Brazilian regulator did the same. In Brazil, a court quickly overturned the regulator’s order. In Italy, Meta announced that it will charge AI companies a per message fee for running their chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators force the company to allow chatbots. WhatsApp currently charges companies for using its API for various template responses to customers.

France Pushing Digital Sovereignty Directing Ministries Off Zoom and Teams

Report from ZDNET

In Brief – French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has directed all French government officials and civil servants to stop using American-owned video conference software such as Teams and Zoom by 2027 in favor of a new French-made application called Visio. The policy is part of France’s “digital sovereignty” strategy to reduce reliance on foreign software providers and gain greater control over critical digital infrastructure. Visio, in testing for a year and currently with about 40,000 users, is part of France’s “Suite Numérique,” a sovereign digital ecosystem designed to replace tools such as Gmail and Slack for civil servants. The video conference application includes AI-powered meeting transcription and speaker identification developed by a French startup and is hosted on Outscale’s sovereign cloud infrastructure. Officials claim the switch could save up to €1 million annually per 100,000 users, while improving security, confidentiality, and resilience. Last July, the French Government instructed its officials to start using a government-designed messaging app, called “Tchap,” instead of foreign-owned messaging apps.

Context – The huge disruptions in US-EU relations that marked the entire first year of the second Trump presidency boosted European “digital sovereignty” efforts and the rapid escalation of January’s Greenland crisis put an exclamation point on those concerns. In March, nearly 100 European companies and trade groups signed a letter called on the EU Commission to take “radical action” for Europe to become more technologically independent. The year closed with France and Germany co-hosting a Summit on European Digital Sovereignty where French President Emmanuel Macron said that Europe must not be a “client” of outside tech providers or a “vassal” to the US or China. The Eurostack Initiative details actions to promote European offerings across the digital ecosystem, including chips, computing, applications, and AI. Meanwhile, taxes and regulatory limits on US tech companies will likely impact European business and consumer customers of successful digital services by imposing higher costs or degrading services.

Spanish PM Announces Social Media Age Threshold Amidst Musk Tussle

Report from AP News

In Brief – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has announced plans for a package of measures to regulate online companies, including banning teens under 16 from social media platforms that he called “a space of addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation and violence.” Other proposals include making platform executives criminally liable for failing to remove illegal or hateful content, creating a new criminal offense for algorithmic manipulation and amplification of illegal material, and introducing a “hate and polarization footprint” system to measure how platforms fuel division. Sanchez called out Elon Musk’s platform X by name, claiming it “amplified disinformation” over his administration’s recent decision last week to grant legal status to 500,000 undocumented migrants. Musk responded saying, “Dirty Sanchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.”

Context – Spain may join the growing list of countries following Australia with an age limit for social media, but the harsh back and forth between Sanchez and Musk is about the billionaire’s proclivity to attack progressive politicians and back populist conservatives. He’s repeatedly been accused of election interference by European leaders including by French President Emanuel Macron, and French government prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of X last year targeting how the platform's recommendation algorithms deal with political issues. Those prosecutors recently expanded their probe and raided X’s Paris office. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is the EU law that regulates how digital platforms police illegal and objectionable content online, and the European Commission is the lead regulator for the largest platforms, which includes X. The Commission is engaged in several investigations of X, including how its algorithms handle politically sensitive content. The DSA’s backers say that the law protects free expression, but they also argue that law's regulation of “recommender systems" is different from regulating the content itself. Critics disagree. Regulating how social media, especially X, handles political content, is the most sensitive US-EU bilateral digital policy issue.