Germany: Combining Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram leads to monopoly

According to German Justice Minister Katarina Barley, Facebook’s plan to provide its chat services Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram with a unified underlying platform leads to major competition problems.

Combining his messengers is an attempt to create a monopoly, Barley said in a message to Politico. “This plan raises big questions about competition and data protection,” she said. If Facebook goes through with its plans, Germany will ‘without doubt’ invoke European law on this, she further promises.

Barley already called last year that European legislation should be introduced that obliges Facebook to make chat services interoperable, whereby users of Signal and Threema can, for example, send messages to WhatsApp users. The German minister made a comparison with mobile calls by a customer from one provider to a customer from another provider. Technically, this would also be possible for messenger services, according to her.

On Thursday, Facebook confirmed that it wants to unify the infrastructure behind Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Using end-to-end encryption as standard would make communications more secure and make it easier for merchants on Facebook to get in touch with users of the various services.