EU orders Meta to open WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots

The matter is this: A government in Europe has commanded a private company to open its doors to competitors, on pain of severe penalty, within the span of five working days. The question is whether any of the reasons given for this current arrangement would survive a conversation with someone who owed it nothing.

We are told this is about competition. We are told it is about the AI assistant market. These are polite terms for a dispute that is fundamentally about ownership. Meta, a corporation built on the labor of millions and the data of billions, holds a platform that connects people. The European Union, a collection of governments, has decided that this platform is not truly Meta’s to control. It has decreed that rival artificial intelligences must have free access to the private communications of Meta’s users. The logic is that if one gatekeeper stands too tall, the state must force him to lower the gate for others, regardless of whether the gatekeeper built the gate, maintains the gate, or pays for the upkeep of the gate.

Let us strip away the historical costume of this argument. The official justification is that Meta has abused its dominant position. This is a legal phrase that sounds heavy and serious, but it is merely a way of saying that Meta has succeeded. Success is not a crime. If a baker makes the best bread in London, and everyone buys his bread, has he abused his position? Has he violated the rights of the man who sells stale loaves? If we answer yes to the baker, we have abandoned reason and replaced it with envy dressed as law. The EU does not claim Meta has stolen the AI technology. It does not claim Meta has forced users to stay through violence or fraud. It claims that the mere existence of a popular platform is an obstacle to the free flow of other technologies.

This brings us to the hereditary test. Is this arrangement inherited or chosen? The power of the state to interfere in private contracts is an ancient power, inherited from kings who believed that trade was a privilege granted by the crown, not a right possessed by the individual. Today, that power has changed its clothes. It no longer claims divine right; it claims regulatory necessity. But the mechanism is the same. The government assumes that it knows better than the market what is good for the market. It assumes that because Meta is large, it must be wrong. This is not reasoning; it is a reflex. It is the political equivalent of cutting down a tall tree because it blocks the view of the shorter shrubs.

Consider the plain translation of what is being proposed. The EU is saying that the value of Whats App lies not in the service it provides to its users, but in the raw material it offers to other companies. The users are no longer customers; they are public infrastructure. Their private messages, their social graphs, their daily interactions are to be treated as a common resource, available to any AI chatbot that wishes to use them. If this is acceptable for Whats App, what is to stop the state from declaring that a newspaper’s subscriber list is public property for rival publishers? What stops it from declaring that a university’s student records are public property for rival tutors? The principle, once admitted, has no natural limit. It eats itself.

There is a deeper contradiction here that the regulators have not noticed. They wish to promote competition in the AI market, yet they do so by destroying competition in the platform market. By forcing Meta to share its infrastructure, they remove the incentive for Meta to innovate. Why build a better service if the government will simply force you to give it away to your rivals? You might as well do nothing. The result is not a vibrant market of competing AIs, but a stagnant field where no one dares to build anything of real value, for fear that their success will be punished as dominance.

The urgency of the five-day deadline is itself a tell. It suggests that the regulators are not interested in a careful examination of truth, but in the performance of power. They wish to show that they can command the giants. But power that cannot justify itself by reason is not power; it is merely noise.

You, the reader, must decide whether you wish to live in a world where success is penalized by decree, or in one where it is rewarded by merit. The EU has chosen the former. It has decided that the state is the ultimate arbiter of fairness, rather than the consent of those who use the service. This is not common sense. It is the opposite of it. It is the belief that the government is a wise father who knows best, rather than a servant who should do only what he is explicitly hired to do.

The arrangement cannot justify itself from scratch. If you proposed to a stranger that his private home should be opened to strangers because he happens to have a nice garden, he would call you mad. Yet this is exactly what the EU is doing to Meta. It is not about AI. It is about the old, tired idea that the state owns everything, and the individual owns nothing. That idea has failed in castles; it will fail in chatbots. The only difference is that this time, the chains are made of code, and the prison is called regulation.