Report from Medianama
In Brief – India’s National Company Law Tribunal (NCLAT), a judicial appeals panel, has set aside part of an antitrust order from the country’s competition authority in ruling that Meta’s WhatsApp service could continue to share the user data with other Meta platforms for advertising purposes, but maintained the portion of antitrust decision that the digital giant had abused its position of dominance and the resulting fine. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) ruled in November 2024 that Meta had violated India’s 2002 Competition Act when they changed WhatsApp’s privacy policy in 2021. The new user policy expanded the scope of data collection on WhatsApp and required that a user agree that data could be shared with other Meta companies for advertising purposes. The regulator determined that requiring users to accept data sharing as a condition of service was unfair, imposed a $25.4 million fine, and banned WhatsApp from sharing user data with other Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram for advertising for five years. The appeals panel stayed the CCI’s order last January, noting that blocking data sharing for advertising could undermine the ability of the widely used free service to operate, and have now backed the CCI’s determination that the change in user terms of service was done in an unfair manner, and the fine, but struck down the prohibition on data sharing for advertising on Meta’s services.
Context – India is Meta’s biggest market when measured by users, with over 500 million people using WhatsApp and more than 350 million Facebook users. The CCI’s effort to use antitrust law to block data sharing between WhatsApp and other Meta services is similar to the successful effort of the German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) to police Meta data policies and prohibit combining the data of individual users across its different services without their freely given consent. The German antitrust agency announced new Meta data protocols in 2023 that give German users “much greater control over how their data are combined.”