Report from TechCrunch
In Brief – Meta has 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 on the platform. The policy will go into effect in Italy on February 16. Meta says that the pricing for non-template chatbot responses will be $0.0691/ €0.0572 / £0.0498 per message. WhatsApp charges companies for using its API for various template responses to customers, such as for marketing, payment reminders, shipping updates and authentication. Creating a new chatbot message charge follows some regulatory pushback against changes made to the WhatsApp business terms of service last October that effectively banned third-party chatbots from interacting with users over the platform. The Italian competition watchdog, AGCM, ordered Meta to suspend the ban in Italy while it investigated whether the company abused its market power by implementing a policy that would lock-in customers to Meta’s chatbot offerings, which still operate over WhatsApp, and harm AI chatbot competitors. Meta, who argued that the growth of AI chatbots was straining WhatsApp Business API systems, then exempted Italian users from the ban.
Context – Italy’s AGCM was the first competition regulator to order Meta to suspend its chatbot ban. Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, later issued a similar order, leading Meta to pause the policy in Brazil for 90 days while they appealed the regulator’s action. A Brazilian court recently sided with the company and suspended the CADE order, leading Meta to institute their chatbot ban there. 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 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, while Chat-GPT has approximately an 80% market share in the EU and it is even higher in Brazil, Meta’s chatbot shares barely register.