Report from Reuters
In Brief – A two-judge panel of the Indian National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has temporarily halted the Competition Commission of India (CCI) order prohibiting WhatsApp from sharing user data with other services of its parent company, Meta. The judges ruled that the ban could cripple the WhatsApp business and that the CCI order should be stayed while it was appealed. The NCLAT also stayed the CCI’s penalty of 2.13 billion rupees (around $25.25 million), although WhatsApp was required to deposit 50 percent of the amount. The CCI ruled in November that WhatsApp and Meta violated the 2002 Competition Act by “abusing its dominant position” when the messaging app’s privacy policy was changed in 2021 to require users to accept that their data could be shared with other companies and services within Meta and imposed a five-year prohibition on WhatsApp sharing its user data with other Meta companies for advertising purposes. Data sharing for purposes other than advertising requires a detailed explanation in the user agreement and must be needed to provide the WhatsApp service itself. As part of their appeal of the order, Meta claimed that prohibiting data sharing between WhatsApp and other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram in India would reduce business opportunities for Indian small businesses using those platforms to connect with customers.
Context – India is Meta’s biggest market when measured by users, with 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 last October that give German users “much greater control over how their data are combined.” Meta did not say if the new policies would be expanded to other markets.