{"id":753683,"date":"2026-02-09T23:01:31","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T23:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/753683\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T23:01:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T23:01:31","slug":"meta-faces-eu-action-over-ai-rival-block-on-whatsapp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/753683\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta faces EU action over AI rival block on WhatsApp"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The European Union on Monday threatened to impose interim measures on <strong>Meta Platforms<\/strong> over the tech giant\u2019s blocking of rival artificial intelligence chatbots on its WhatsApp messaging service.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We must protect effective competition \u200cin this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give \u200dthemselves an unfair advantage,&#8221; said EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;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&#8217;s \u200cnew policy irreparably harming competition in Europe.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>However, Meta said there were \u201cmany AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites and industry partnerships&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The commission&#8217;s logic incorrectly assumes the WhatsApp Business API (software) is a key distribution channel for these chatbots.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The European Union on Monday threatened to impose interim measures on Meta Platforms over the tech giant\u2019s blocking&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[10281,34661,196742,206386,222041,206387,222042,2000,299,5187,1699,60872,598,49079,222040,599],"class_list":["post-753683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-action","tag-block","tag-categoryall","tag-categorycompany-news","tag-categoryheadline-news","tag-categorynews-and-announcements","tag-categorysectorial-technology-services","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-faces","tag-meta","tag-over","tag-rival","tag-whatsapp"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116043165849566764","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}