Market abuse complaints against Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary have been escalated to the Competition Tribunal for abuse of dominance over attempts to offboard messaging service GovChat from the WhatsApp Business platform.
This follows a complaint lodged with the Competition Commission (CC) in November 2021 by GovChat and #LetsTalk against Facebook Inc (recently rebranded as Meta).
In 2014, Facebook acquired control of the WhatsApp messaging app.
The app is used by GovChat, a platform launched in 2018 to allow members of the public to engage at different levels of government and to report a wide variety of issues such as pothole location and other service delivery requirements.
The CC claims Facebook decided around July 2020 to offboard GovChat and #LetsTalk from the WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface (WhatsApp Business API).
“Facebook has imposed and/or selectively enforced exclusionary terms and conditions regulating access to the WhatsApp Business API, mainly restrictions on the use of data,” says the commission in a statement.
This contravenes the Competition Act, which “prohibits a dominant firm from abusing its dominance by engaging in exclusionary conduct geared at preventing competitors or potential competitors from entering into, participating, and expanding in a market.”
The commission says the WhatsApp Business API allows businesses and government to message at scale and makes use of advanced automation, while integrating with existing eCommerce, building chatbots and tracking metrics.
The South African allegations of anti-competitive behaviour follow similar cases filed in the US by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Facebook/Meta which is accused of a systematic strategy to eliminate its competition.
The complainants in these cases, which include 45 states, have asked that the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp be declared illegal. This would force Facebook to sell these subsidiaries.
Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 later for $19 billion.
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