I may be misunderstanding this legalese vocabulary but doesn't "unable" mean "technically incapable"? As in, there's no technical way of matching users?

Because if so, man, whoever wrote this must have laughed a lot when they wrote it. You may not be able to match 100% of users of course, but with the amount of personal data FB has access to it should be able to match a good chunk of the userbase with a high degree of confidence if it wanted to.

In the 2014 merger procedure [1] Facebook described it as 'very hard', and 'against its own interest'.

> "The Notifying Party submitted that integration between WhatsApp and Facebook would pose significant technical difficulties. Notably, integration of WhatsApp's and Facebook's networks would require matching WhatsApp users' profiles with their profiles on Facebook (or vice versa). This would be complicated without the users' involvement since Facebook and WhatsApp use different unique user identifiers: Facebook ID and mobile phone number, respectively. Consequently, Facebook would be unable to automatically and reliably associate a Facebook ID with a valid phone number used by a user on WhatsApp. Matching of WhatsApp profiles with Facebook profiles would most likely have to be done manually by users, which in the Notifying Party's view is likely to result in a significant backlash from both users of Facebook and WhatsApp who do not want to match their accounts. Finally, the Notifying Party stated that, beyond the difficulties in matching user IDs, significant engineering hurdles would have to be overcome to enable cross-platform communications, reflecting the fundamentally different architecture of Facebook and WhatsApp (including the former being cloud-based, the latter not)."

It seems the EU commission interpreted the statement as 'not possible'. Facebook played them.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m72...

I don't know exactly what to say when reading this. I'm astounded that somebody could consider this a reliable explanation. Still, I can assume incompetence from whoever did that, but the person who drafted it is clearly in bad faith. How can that have no repercussions?

It did have repercussions, albeit extremely limited to the scale of Facebook, they were fined 110 million euros

> doesn't "unable" mean "technically incapable"?

Unable is followed by "to establish reliable automated matching".

I think the key words here are "reliable" and "automated". There's a ton of wiggle room in those words.

Reliable is the key word. That's subjective. Could mean anything from 1% to 99.99%. In some cases 99.99% is still unreliable ;)

"Unable" is an interesting word. Does that mean they would never allow the possibility by policy, or that they could not at that time do it, but they have the option to enable it technically in the future?

The interesting word I think is "reliable": some extremely rare corner case where the match isn't correct would be enough to make that claim true, but they make it sound as if it was worse than randomly guessing.

Indeed. That 0.01% is very handy, when you're being grilled by oversight.

I think this is what Facebook got fined for earlier, right? (With the caveat that it did not lead to a reversal of the regulatory approval of the merger, because it was not contingent on this.)