When Meta closed WhatsApp’s doors to rival AI assistants last October, it looked like a straightforward power play — use your platform, lock out competitors, promote your own. The EU noticed. What came next was more telling.
Rather than fight the investigation head-on, Meta came back in March with a compromise: third-party AI providers could return to WhatsApp, but they’d have to pay a per-query fee to offset infrastructure costs. It seemed like a reasonable middle ground. Brussels wasn’t impressed.
“Replacing the legal ban with pricing that has a similar effect does not change our preliminary view that Meta’s conduct appears to be an abuse of its dominant position,” said Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice president overseeing competition. The EU sent Meta a fresh charge sheet this week, pushing the case toward an interim order that would force the company to restore access under the original conditions.
The timeline matters. Meta changed its WhatsApp Business terms in October 2025, and by January 2026, Meta AI was the only AI assistant running on a platform with over 3 billion users. Every rival was out. The EU opened a formal antitrust investigation in December.
What’s unusual about this case is the scope. The Commission isn’t just asking Meta to stop doing something. It’s moving toward forcing a positive obligation: restore access on the terms that existed before October 2025, not terms Meta gets to set. Interim measures are rare in EU competition cases. Regulators reaching for one signals they believe the market damage is happening now, not after a years-long investigation concludes.
Meta’s defense probably isn’t wrong on the merits — running infrastructure for billions of messages costs something. But that’s not the argument the Commission is adjudicating. The question is whether WhatsApp, as a dominant platform, can use that position to eliminate competition in an adjacent market. The EU’s preliminary answer is that it cannot, regardless of how the restriction is packaged.
If Meta refuses to comply with an interim order, it faces fines up to 10% of global annual revenue. At Meta’s 2024 figures, that’s roughly $16 billion. The company has time to appeal or restructure again — but the window for clever workarounds appears to be closing.
What Brussels decides here may determine whether AI distribution on major messaging platforms looks like an open market or a toll road.
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