WhatsApp in the dock over ‘dominance’
SA is the latest country to hold the social giant accountable for its ‘abuse of dominance’ by trying to shut out a smaller company
There is a prima facie case of "abuse of dominance" against WhatsApp and its parent, Meta Platforms, the Competition Commission has found.It has referred them to the Competition Tribunal "for prosecution", and has proposed a hefty fine of "10% of [the] collective turnover" of Meta (and its Facebook and WhatsApp subsidiaries) in SA.Since Facebook (as it was then known) was referred to the competition watchdog in November 2020, the tribunal has twice interdicted it from "offboarding" an SA messaging service run by startup GovChat, called #LetsTalk.The commission found that the terms and conditions governing access to the WhatsApp Business application programming interface (API) "are designed to shield and insulate Facebook from potential competition, such as [that] presented by GovChat, and [the] enormous data it has been able to harvest which enables it to develop new services and products".The commission also found that "the intended offboarding of GovChat from the WhatsApp Business...
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