WhatsApp as a Stress Test for Interim Measures in EU’s Competition Law

The European Commission has informed Meta that it intends to impose interim measures in its antitrust investigation into Meta’s AI policy on WhatsApp, two months after opening the probe on Dec. 4, 2025. Interim measures may be adopted “in cases of urgency due to the risk of serious and irreparable damage to competition,” allowing the commission to order the company to halt the conduct while the investigation is ongoing.

The Commission is investigating Meta's policy prohibiting AI providers from using the WhatsApp Business Solution to allow users to interact with other chatbots from Meta's own AI. As previously reported, the WhatsApp Business Solution is designed for customer service but has been adopted by rival chatbot services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. After Meta said it would no longer support the integration for chatbots, OpenAI and Microsoft said they would remove their chatbots from WhatsApp. OpenAI reported that 50 million users were interacting with ChatGPT through WhatsApp.

Before the European Commission opened its investigation, competition authorities in Italy and Brazil launched their own probes and secured exemptions from Meta’s policy, allowing users in those jurisdictions to continue accessing other chatbots on WhatsApp. A complainant in the EU said the speed of those cases has highlighted delays in the commission’s proceedings. Teresa Ribera, the executive vice president for competition policy, said the commission would use interim measures to ensure effective enforcement and seek to extend an exemption across Europe.

The Commission cited preliminary findings that WhatsApp is likely dominant in the EU and that Meta may be abusing that position by restricting access for third-party AI assistants. It said the conduct poses a risk of serious and irreparable harm by raising barriers to entry in the market for general-purpose AI assistants. The need to move quickly in this case was highlighted by Ribera, who said in a statement that rapid developments in the AI market require swift action to preserve competitors' access to WhatsApp while the investigation is ongoing.

Meta now retains the right to defend itself, and has publicly stated that “[t]he Commission’s logic incorrectly assumes the WhatsApp Business API is a key distribution channel for these chatbots.” After an oral hearing on the matter, if the Commission concludes that the conditions for imposing interim measures have been met, it will be able to require Meta to exempt the EU from its policy.

Understanding interim measures

One of the major criticisms leveled at European regulators, particularly antitrust enforcement, is the length of investigations and the slowness of enforcement. For instance, in a study commissioned by the Directorate-General for Competition reviewing antitrust enforcement and remedies, the authors found that investigations into whether conduct has infringed competition law (under Article 7) last on average almost four years.

A striking example of such long timelines is the case against Google Shopping. The Commission originally opened the investigation in 2010, reaching a decision seven years later. Google challenged this decision, and the proceedings finally ended when the Court of Justice upheld it in 2024. Lawyers Christian Ritz, Christoph Wünschmann, and Florian von Schreitter wrote that one of the issues of such long timelines is the risk that interventions are rendered “obsolete by the time remedies are applied, an issue particularly relevant in fast-evolving or digital markets, where delay can lock in anticompetitive effects, entrench incumbents, and leave little space for corrective impact.”

The Commission has legal instruments designed to circumvent such timelines. For instance, the introduction of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been created in part to tackle anticompetitive behavior in digital markets by imposing rules on incumbent companies, rather than attempting to correct behavior after the fact. However, the Commission can also use interim measures in investigations to stop harmful conduct. Brian Cullen points out that although interim measures have been part of the Commission’s enforcement toolkit since the EU courts’ Camera Care order in 1980, the Commission has used them sparingly, only once since formally codifying the power in Regulation 1/2003, despite repeated multiyear investigations in fast-moving markets such as Google Shopping.

One reason interim measures are used so sparingly is the high legal threshold required to impose them. Cullen explains that the standard requires a prima facie finding of an infringement, urgency due to the risk of serious and irreparable harm to competition, and proportionality based on a balance of interests, requirements that are widely viewed as procedurally arduous. A Commission-commissioned review of antitrust enforcement similarly found that several interviewees, including a law practitioner and a Commission case manager, said the “serious and irreparable harm” standard is excessively burdensome to meet. The review noted that national competition authorities face a lower threshold, helping explain why they have been able to act more quickly than the Commission in cases such as this one.

Researcher Carla Farinhas notes that the entry into force of Regulation 1/2003 coincided with the rise of an economics- and effects-based approach to competition law, which pushed the Commission away from early intervention and toward a more deregulatory enforcement model. She argues that, in digital markets that tend to concentrate around a single dominant firm, the Commission has since recognized that increasingly complex and lengthy investigations allow harmful practices to become entrenched, leaving infringement decisions unable to reverse anticompetitive effects. This, Farinhas says, has created fertile ground for a policy shift toward reviving interim measures.

Farinhas’ article advocates for competition law tools to be used alongside newer instruments like the DMA, “to tackle problematic examples of big tech power could and should be more ambitious,” an opinion very similar to Simonetta Vezzoso, a researcher from Trento University, who has also advocated for “a concerted regulatory front combining multiple toolkits at once.”

Arguably, the Meta case’s significance lies in its procedural aspects. It is a test for the Commission to see if it can revive a potentially powerful instrument to intervene much earlier in antitrust cases.