Transcription
Last month, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands became the latest European countries to roll out a domestic messaging service for public sector workers, following similar moves last year by Germany and France, in an effort to reduce their dependence on the American apps WhatsApp and Signal.
It follows reports last month that Russian-backed hackers were impersonating European officials on Signal in an effort to obtain sensitive information, which then led to Brussels telling senior officials to shut down a Signal group chat last month.
On top of that, last week the European Commission sent a second charge sheet to Meta as part of its ongoing antitrust probe into WhatsApp, arguing that its new AI chatbot policy appears to be "an abuse of its dominant position in violation of the EU's competition rules."
So, in this video, we'll explain the EU's ongoing battle with Meta and why European governments are now ditching WhatsApp. If you love staying informed and want some of the best reporting on YouTube, then subscribe and ring the bell for more.
So, let's start with some context because these most recent moves against WhatsApp haven't come out of the blue, and the EU has actually been in a long-standing antitrust battle with WhatsApp and its parent company, Meta. This dispute stems from the fact that WhatsApp is by far the biggest messaging app in Europe, used by more than 85% of people in Germany, Romania, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. And this extreme market dominance has led to growing concerns amongst policymakers and regulators about limited consumer choice and the potential for anti-competitive behavior against other platforms.
Anyway, back in December 2025, the EU opened a formal antitrust investigation into Meta to assess whether its new policy on AI providers' access to WhatsApp, announced in October 2025, violated EU competition rules. Essentially, the EU was concerned that Meta's WhatsApp Business Solution tool, an AI chatbot that allowed businesses to communicate with customers via WhatsApp, prevented non-Meta AI providers such as OpenAI from being able to operate on WhatsApp in the European Economic Area or EEA, whilst only allowing Meta's service, Meta AI, to operate on the platform. The EU was concerned that Meta's policy violated its competition rules, specifically Article 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement, both of which deal with the "abuse of a dominant position within the EU's internal market or the EEA."
In February, the EU then sent a statement of objections, effectively a document setting out charges to Meta, saying its policy appeared to be a breach of EU competition rules. In response, on March the 4th, Meta then published a revised AI policy, reversing the ban, but instead introducing a pricing framework that applied only to third-party AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Specifically, these AI chatbot providers would be allowed to offer their services on WhatsApp, but only for a fee of between around 5 cents to 13 cents per non-template message, which are generally messages used for customer support.
In their policy document, Meta specified with an example that if a user in Italy sends an AI provider a prompt and the AI provider delivered three non-template message responses to the user over a span of 5 minutes, that will incur three charges. However, while these fees might sound tiny at first, at scale, they could easily become costly for providers, which would likely choose to pass on those costs to businesses. As such, businesses on WhatsApp would be encouraged to use Meta's own AI chatbot, which offers free non-template messages within a certain customer service window rather than pay to use another provider.
As such, last Wednesday, the European Commission sent another charge sheet to Meta, arguing that its proposal to charge fees for rival AI chatbots on WhatsApp was effectively equivalent to banning their access. The EU's antitrust chief, Thierry Breton, said, "Replacing the legal ban with pricing that has a similar effect does not change our preliminary view that Meta's conduct appears to be an abuse of its dominant position that may seriously harm competition on the market for AI assistance."
In response, a Meta spokesperson said the European Commission was "proposing to use its regulatory powers to enable some of the largest companies in the world to use the paid-for WhatsApp Business product for free," claiming that a small bakery in France paying to use the service to take orders would be picking up the tab for OpenAI and arguing small businesses shouldn't foot OpenAI's bill.
But the WhatsApp antitrust issue is just one part of the EU's wider battle against US big tech. As we've covered in previous videos, Europe is trying to reduce its strategic dependence on foreign, especially American tech, and build up Europe's so-called digital sovereignty. This is largely in reaction to US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened Europe since his return to office in January 2025 and has proved both willing and able to exercise leverage over big tech firms in the US. This has made European policymakers and electorates anxious about the US either using its technological dominance to surveil Europe or cut off access to certain services.
An SWG Polling Europe survey conducted in January, for instance, found that a majority, 59%, of Europeans think the blocking of digital services by the US is an already real and concrete risk, while an overwhelming 86% agree that it's at least plausible and should not be ruled out.
As such, in an effort to reduce Europe's reliance on WhatsApp and other US messaging platforms like Signal, a number of European governments, including France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands, are now rolling out secure, open-source alternatives to WhatsApp in the public sector. And even the European Commission is also reportedly set to switch to its own messaging service by the end of the year.
France's messaging service, CHAP, claims to have more than 600,000 users across French state departments. And Belgium's Beam, which launched last month, is intended to serve around 750,000 civil servants and military personnel. The Dutch government is also now piloting a project using one of the European alternatives with a long-term aim of adopting a messaging platform fully controlled by the Dutch government. Essentially, these European domestic alternatives are trying to provide a more secure, sovereign messaging service which complies with EU regulations around data and advertising, and where users aren't at risk of being surveilled or cut off by a foreign government.
While France and Germany's domestic alternatives to WhatsApp date back to 2019, when the French service CHAP and German service Bundes Messenger were launched, Trump's return to office has accelerated and revitalized these initiatives. In October, Germany released the latest version of its Bundes Messenger app, which was initially designed as a secure WhatsApp for soldiers, explicitly calling it an expression of digital sovereignty and noting that the app fully complies with German data protection standards, is used by the German armed forces, and is developed transparently. The website adds, unlike commercial services and providers, no data is sold, and no advertising is displayed.
At the moment, this shift is mostly happening within government and civil service departments, but there's reason to think that it could expand to other professional and public-facing services across Europe in future if concerns about American tech and data sovereignty linger.
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