EU orders Meta to open WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots

The principle operating here, stated plainly, is: a sovereign authority may compel a private agent to surrender the exclusive use of their property to competitors, under the guise of market efficiency, provided the agent’s dominance is sufficiently entrenched. Let us ask whether this principle, universalised, produces coherence or contradiction.

To evaluate the European Union’s order that Meta grant rival AI chatbots free access to Whats App, we must first isolate the maxim from the noise of political expediency. The EU does not claim that Meta has committed a fraud in the traditional sense; rather, it asserts that Meta’s control over a communication platform constitutes a barrier to entry so high that it requires state-enforced interoperability. The implicit justification is that the end - competitive diversity in the artificial intelligence market - justifies the means - the compulsory opening of private infrastructure. This is a consequentialist calculation disguised as legal rectitude. It substitutes the question of “what is the optimal market structure?” for the question of “what is owed to the rational agent who built this structure?”

Let us apply the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Can we will that it become a universal law that any entity possessing a dominant position in a market must, upon command, provide free access to its proprietary systems to rivals? If we universalise this, we arrive at a world where property rights are contingent not on ownership or stewardship, but on utility to the collective. The concept of private enterprise would dissolve into a managed commons, where the incentive to innovate is replaced by the obligation to distribute. In such a world, the distinction between the creator and the consumer vanishes. If I build a bridge, I must allow all who wish to cross it to do so without toll, regardless of whether I invested my capital and labor to construct it. The contradiction lies not in the desire for competition, but in the negation of the very agency that creates the value being competed for. To will the universalisation of forced access is to will the destruction of the motive for creation. The rational agent cannot consistently will a world where their own efforts are subject to arbitrary redistribution by decree, for it renders their own planning and investment irrational.

We must then turn to the second formulation: the Humanity Formula. Are Meta, its developers, and its shareholders being treated as ends in themselves, or merely as means to the end of a diversified AI market? The EU’s intervention treats Meta’s infrastructure as a resource to be mined for the public good, ignoring the autonomy of the corporation as a moral agent. While corporations are legal fictions, they are composed of human beings whose labor and intellectual property are being instrumentalised. To force access is to say that the value of the platform belongs to the market, not to its creators. This violates the dignity of the rational agent by subordinating their rights to an administrative objective. The state, in acting this way, assumes the role of the ultimate arbiter of value, deciding that the competitive landscape is more important than the rights of the entity that maintains the landscape.

One might argue that this is not theft, but regulation. But regulation that compels the surrender of proprietary advantage is indistinguishable from expropriation if the compensation is not equivalent to the loss of exclusivity. The “free access” demanded is not a public good in the sense of air or sunlight; it is the result of specific, costly human activity. To treat it as if it were a natural resource is a category error. It confuses the fruit of industry with the soil itself.

The stakes here are not merely economic; they are metaphysical. If the state can compel interoperability whenever it deems a market insufficiently competitive, it asserts that no private arrangement is stable enough to be respected. This creates a climate of moral uncertainty. Why build a secure, high-quality platform if it will inevitably be opened to those who may degrade it, not for their own benefit, but for the abstract benefit of “competition”? The duty of the state is to protect the rights of all agents equally, not to engineer outcomes that it believes are desirable. By intervening, the EU abandons its role as the guardian of rights and assumes the role of the manager of outcomes. This is a shift from the rule of law to the rule of administration.

The duty that follows from this analysis is clear. The state must refrain from compelling Meta to grant free access, as such compulsion cannot be universalised without contradiction and treats the corporation merely as a means to an economic end. The proper course is to ensure that the market remains open to new entrants through other means - such as preventing anti-competitive contracts or ensuring data portability rights that do not require the surrender of proprietary infrastructure. To do otherwise is to sacrifice principle for convenience, and in doing so, to undermine the very foundation of rational agency upon which a free society rests. The moral law demands that we respect the boundaries of individual agency, even when those boundaries seem inconvenient to the collective desire for variety.