BRUSSELS — Meta built WhatsApp into a gate that some three billion people pass through every day, and then set about charging a toll on anyone who wanted to bring a rival artificial intelligence assistant through it. On Tuesday the European Union told it to take the toll booth down. The bloc’s competition regulator ordered Meta to give rival AI chatbots free access to WhatsApp within five working days, or face heavy fines.
The European Commission framed the order as an interim measure while it continues an antitrust investigation into how WhatsApp handles artificial intelligence. Its concern is that Meta is breaching EU law by shutting competitors out of the platform, denying them the ability to offer their own assistants to WhatsApp’s enormous user base while Meta promotes its own. The Commission said it was acting to head off harm to competition in the fast-growing market for AI assistants before the damage became permanent.
The detail that gives the case away is how Meta tried to settle it. Rather than simply reopening the platform, the company offered to let rivals back in if they paid for the privilege. Regulators were not satisfied, having warned in April that they would force the access to be restored for free, and they have now done exactly that. A company turning entry to its own messaging app into a revenue stream, and a moat, is the behaviour of a gatekeeper that has understood precisely how much power its position confers.
What is being fought over is some of the most valuable ground in technology right now. WhatsApp is where Meta wants to place its own assistant in front of billions of people, and letting OpenAI, Google or anyone else reach those same users on equal terms cuts against that plan. The messaging app is a prime piece of real estate in the contest over the AI assistants that every major company is now racing to embed everywhere, from phones to desktops to the apps people already live inside.
The order is only the latest blow Brussels has landed on Meta. The same regulator has already fined the company under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, penalised it close to 800 million euros over its Marketplace business, and struck at its pay-or-consent advertising model. In the absence of any comparable check from Washington, the European Commission has become the main force willing to tell American technology giants that owning a platform does not mean owning everyone who has to use it.
It is a fitting target. Meta is a company that has been ordered to pay repeatedly for what regulators call abusive conduct, that is already found liable in court for what its products do to the people who use them, and that is on trial in the United States over whether it should be broken up and made to sell Instagram and WhatsApp outright. Its instinct on entering a new market is to wall it off, and the regulators tend to arrive only once the wall is up and the rivals are already shut outside it.
None of this makes Brussels a disinterested champion of the open internet. The interim order is not a final verdict, and Meta can contest it as the investigation grinds on. The same European bloc has pushed its own intrusive plans for WhatsApp, including proposals to mass-scan private messages, that have little to do with competition and a great deal to do with surveillance. Forcing interoperability is the narrower and cleaner sort of intervention, aimed at keeping a market contestable rather than at reading what people send, and it is the kind that the ferocious contest among the AI labs will keep generating.
Meta now has five days to open a door it spent months trying to keep shut, and a far longer fight ahead over whether it gets to keep gatekeeping at all. The question the case puts plainly is the one the entire platform economy has been built to avoid answering: whether the company that owns the pipes also gets to own everything that flows through them. For the next five days, at least, Brussels has said that it does not.
