Report from the Wall Street Journal
In Brief – Meta has announced that it will allow third-party AI chatbots to communicate with users on its WhatsApp messaging platform for a per-message fee in response to pressure from the European Commission. The Commission is investigating the policy announced by Meta last October blocking competing chatbots such as Chat-GPT from using the WhatsApp Business API to communicate with users. The regulator is concerned that it could harm competition in the emerging market for general-purpose AI assistants and that temporary safeguards might be needed to prevent irreparable market damage while their investigation proceeds. Meta says that it will restore access of rival AI providers to the WhatsApp Business API in Europe for the next 12 months and will charge companies a per message fee like they currently do for many business API uses of the WhatsApp service. Meta argues that their step should remove the need for immediate regulatory intervention and give EU authorities time to complete their probe. EU officials said that they are reviewing the proposal.
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 a per message fee for running their chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators forced the company to open WhatsApp to chatbots. Meta proposed pricing for non-template chatbot responses as $0.0691/ €0.0572 / £0.0498 per message. Brazil’s antitrust regulator later issued a similar order, which after off-and-on court rulings, is back on. So, the per-message fee proposal appears back on in Brazil. Regulators who are sympathetic to chatbot operator complaints highlight WhatsApp’s strong position in the messaging market, while Meta argues that its chatbots hold very small shares of the AI chatbot market compared to dominant providers like OpenAI, with Chat-GPT having approximately an 80% market share in the EU and even higher in Brazil. The fight will now almost certainly shift to regulators haggling with Meta over the price they propose to charge chatbot companies.