JAKARTA - Meta will exclude Italy from the ban on adding third-party Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots on WhatsApp. That way, chatbot accounts such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity can be accessed again in the country.
This ban was lifted after the Italian antimonopoly authority, AGCM, investigated the platform for alleged abuse of market power. By banning the presence of third-party chatbots, Meta is allegedly only interested in providing exclusive benefits to Meta AI, its chatbot service.
After the investigation was conducted, the regulatory body ordered Meta to suspend blocking third-party chatbots. Meta also decided to comply with the decision. Starting January 15, phone numbers with the country code +39 will be excluded from the update of the terms of service.
This policy will apply globally. Although this blocking of third-party chatbots will be lifted from Italy, Meta reminded the authorities that the surge in the use of AI chatbots on WhatsApp could put a heavier technical burden on their application system.
Meta emphasized that WhatsApp's infrastructure was not designed to run the workload of third-party applications en masse. Seeing the release of the presence of third-party chatbots, other countries may demand similar changes.
Moreover, currently the European Commission is investigating whether Meta's actions blocking competitors have violated the law of market dominance in the EU region. However, the authorities have not issued an order to suspend Meta's ban as Italy did.
For now, users around the world can only use Meta AI on WhatsApp. If they want to use other chatbots, they need to download apps like ChatGPT and Gemini from the App Store and Google Play, or use the chatbots' official websites.
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