Meta faces EU action over AI rival block on WhatsApp

(Sharecast News) - The European Union on Monday threatened to impose interim measures on Meta Platforms over the tech giant's blocking of rival artificial intelligence chatbots on its WhatsApp messaging service. Meta changed its policies to prevent competing chatbots from tapping into a tool for businesses to communicate with customers via WhatsApp, the European Commission said, adding that it was acting to prevent serious and irreparable harm to rivals.

"We must protect effective competition ‌in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give ‍themselves an unfair advantage," said EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera.

"That is why we are considering quickly imposing interim measures on Meta, to preserve access for competitors to WhatsApp while the investigation is ongoing and avoid Meta's ‌new policy irreparably harming competition in Europe."

However, Meta said there were "many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites and industry partnerships".

"The commission's logic incorrectly assumes the WhatsApp Business API (software) is a key distribution channel for these chatbots."

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com