Report from Politico
In Brief – The European Commission announced that it has sent a charge sheet to Meta rejecting its plan to introduce fees for rival AI assistants on WhatsApp, arguing that the proposal effectively mirrors the company’s earlier outright exclusion. The dispute stems from Meta’s announcement in October that was effectively cutting off AI chatbots not operated by Meta from the WhatsApp platform. In December, the Commission initiated an antitrust investigation. In response, Meta said that they would not apply their ban on third-party chatbot operations over WhatsApp in Europe and instead would charge the chatbot companies a per-message fee. The Commission has now provisionally rejected that proposal as functionally the same and still a potential abuse of market dominance. The Commission reiterated that it may impose interim measures to force Meta to restore access during the investigation. Meta continues to defend its approach, arguing the chatbot market is highly competitive, alternative communications platforms are widely available over the internet, and the Commission’s stance effectively allows AI giants like OpenAI to operate over WhatsApp freely while small businesses pay to use WhatsApp.
Context – Italy’s competition regulator was the first to order Meta to suspend its chatbot ban. In response, Meta announced that they would instead charge AI companies in Italy a per message fee for running their chatbots on WhatsApp like they currently do for many uses of WhatsApp’s business API. Brazil’s antitrust regulator later issued a similar order and has also rejected Meta’s fee plan. Regulators who are sympathetic to chatbot operators highlight WhatsApp’s strong position in the messaging market, while Meta argues that its own chatbots hold very small shares of the AI chatbot market compared to dominant providers like OpenAI, which has a nearly 75% market share in the EU. Meta’s chatbot ban does not stop the operations of its own chatbots over WhatsApp, which raises non-discrimination concerns. Also, Meta’s fee proposal imposes the same charges on small chatbot competitors as it does on OpenAI.