Brussels’ AI Squeeze: Regulating What It Leaves Standing
Brussels has boxed itself into a familiar corner: first limit how a platform can make money, then regulate what is left. The European Commission’s case against Meta over WhatsApp is a near-perfect illustration.
On April 15, the European Commission sent Meta a Supplementary Statement of Objections. It signaled its intent to order the company to restore third-party AI assistants’ access to WhatsApp under the terms that applied before Meta’s Oct. 15, 2025 policy change. The move—an interim-measures procedure—marks the latest front in an increasingly strained effort to police competition in generative AI.
The case makes little sense from a consumer-welfare standpoint. It reads less like a coherent theory of harm and more like an attempt to “do something” about generative AI, with the analysis shaped to fit that goal. The Commission proposes to deploy one of its most far-reaching—and rarely used—enforcement tools to protect competitors in a market that, by almost any reasonable metric, remains intensely competitive.
The result is what Robert Bork famously called a “policy at war with itself.”