Italy's Antitrust Authority said Wednesday that it has expanded an investigation into Meta over alleged abuse of its dominant market position.

    The authority said the move regarded the new Business Solution Terms, introduced on October 15, that exclude Meta AI's competitors in the AI Chatbot market from the WhatsApp platform.

    "This change to the contractual terms could limit production, market access or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the authority said.
    "Furthermore, the Authority deems Meta's violation of competition rules capable of severely and irreparably undermining the contestability of the market, due to consumers' limited propensity to change their habits, which hampers switching to competing services".
    It said it has also opened a procedure for the possible adoption of interim measures with respect to the new WhatsApp Business Solution Terms and the integration of new Meta AI interaction tools or features into WhatsApp.
    "We strongly reject these unfounded allegations;" a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
    "WhatsApp's API was not designed to be used with artificial intelligence chatbots, and doing so would result in a severe overload of our systems.
    "The recent (terms) update has no impact on the tens of thousands of companies that provide customer support and send relevant communications, nor on companies that use their preferred AI assistant to converse with their customers.
   

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