Report from Reuters
In Brief – In a surprising and possibly temporary turnabout, a Brazilian court has suspended a recent order imposed by Brazil’s antitrust regulator CADE that blocked Meta from restricting third-party AI chatbots from operating over WhatsApp using the WhatsApp Business API tools. CADE instituted the order while they investigated complaints from AI chatbot providers who alleged that Meta’s policy was anticompetitive. WhatsApp Business, the commercial version of the messaging app that Meta says is designed to allow companies to engage in customer support using WhataApp messaging threads, updated its terms of service last October blocking new AI chatbot providers immediately and closing the messaging service to existing chatbot providers in January. Following the CADE order, WhatsApp announced that they would pause their AI chatbot policy in Brazil for 90 days while appealing the regulator’s action. Following the court reversal, a Meta spokesperson said, “We welcome the court decision suspending CADE’s preventive measure. The facts do not justify intervention in Brazil or anywhere else.”
Context – Italy’s competition regulator, the AGCM, was the first to respond to chatbot company complaints and order Meta to suspend its chatbot ban while it began an antitrust investigation. Meta eventually exempted Italian users from the policy. The European Commission competition authority is also investigating the WhatsApp chatbot policy, although the Brussels investigation does not currently block Meta’s policy from going into effect. Regulators who are sympathetic to chatbot operators highlight Meta’s strong position in the market for messaging apps, while Meta argues that the growth of AI chatbots has strained WhatsApp Business systems that were not designed to support them. Furthermore, Meta argues that while its messaging services are popular, its chatbots enjoy very small shares of the AI chatbot market. For example, while Chat-GPT has a nearly 80% market share in the EU an even higher in Brazil, Meta’s chatbots barely register at all.