Italy's antitrust authority, AKA the body the looks into monopoly abuses by companies, has reportedly launched an investigation into Meta. According to Reuters, the Italian authority is considering, "allegations the company abused its dominant position by installing its artificial intelligence tool on messaging service WhatsApp."
The key detail, it seems, is that Meta foisted its AI assistant onto WhatsApp users without their consent. "By pairing Meta AI with WhatsApp, Meta appears to be able to steer its user base into the new market not through merit-based competition, but by 'forcing' users to accept the availability of two distinct services, potentially harming competing services," the Italian antitrust authority said.
Meta itself has responded to Reuters, saying, "offering free access to our AI features in WhatsApp gives millions of Italians the choice to use AI in a place they already know, trust and understand."
That response notably overlooks the fact that it's not a "choice" at all. The AI features are compulsory, and cannot be switched off or fully disabled. That ominously blue, all-seeing Eye of Zuckeron is ever present.
The really simple and incredibly obvious solution here is to make the AI features in WhatsApp switchable. But Meta, seemingly along with most players in the over-hyped AI industry, is desperate to leverage billions of dollar's worth of AI investment any which way it can. So, making AI compulsory on WhatsApp suddenly turns the entire user base, currently thought to be as many as three billion people per month, into AI customers, of a sort.
It no doubt looks good on the annual report when you can claim so many billion users of AI services. And if Meta is really lucky, it can get a subset of those users hooked on AI features and then do the old switcheroo and start charging subscription fees down the road. Ker-ching!
Anywho, with any luck, the Italian investigation will eventually turn into an EU-wide decision against Meta, and the no-brainer option to turn off the AI features in WhatsApp will be rolled out thereafter. Once that happens in the EU, it will be awfully hard for Meta not to offer the same choice to users elsewhere. And, as Meta itself said, this is all about "choice." Right?
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