The U.S. Federal Trade Commission might stop Facebook Inc. from going through with its plans to add tighter integration among its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram apps. 

The Wall Street Journal reported today that FTC officials are weighing to issue a preliminary injunction against the social networking giant to halt the integration project. According to sources who spoke with the publication, the order could arrive as early as January.

Facebook’s shares fell about 2.7% today on the news.

Word of Facebook’s plans for cross-platform interoperability first emerged at the start of the year by the way of a New York Times report. Sources told the paper that the social network has assigned thousands of employees to build a unified messaging infrastructure that will enable Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram users to communicate with one another. The insiders said that messages will be protected by end-to-end encryption so that even Facebook won’t be able to read their contents. 

In an earnings call shortly after the report, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the main details to investors. But he said that “we’re really early in thinking through this” and said the integration will roll out in 2020 at the earliest.

The project’s 2020 time frame explains the claim in today’s Journal report that the FTC may seek to issue the injunction right away in January. But as eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson pointed out, Facebook has already integrated the advertising systems underlying its services to a large extent. 

“It’s important to note that there is already a great deal of back-end integration between Facebook’s properties when it comes to advertising,” Williamson told SiliconANGLE. “Facebook’s ad system allows marketers to buy ads in multiple placements across its various properties, including the core social network, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, and the system will eventually include WhatsApp when it starts selling ads next year.”

The possible FTC injunction to stop further integration between the services may be a prelude to even more serious regulatory scrutiny. This February, the agency formed a task force to monitor the tech industry that is empowered, among others, to unwind past acquisitions such as Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram. The less tightly Facebook’s platforms are interconnected, the easier it would be to break them up should such a move be considered by federal officials in future.

The FTC might also be looking at other potential antitrust violations. According to today’s Journal report, the injunction could take aim at Facebook’s policies around how competing services are allowed to integrate with its platform.

Image: Christoph Scholz/Flickr