Belgium (Brussels Morning Newspaper) The European Commission is gearing up to raise fresh antitrust charges against Facebook parent company Meta, after investigating complaints that the social network might be abusing the data it collects from users and advertisers to provide an unfair advantage to its classified ads service.
The European Union’s antitrust authority began investigating Meta in June last year, with the British national authority opening a similar investigation on the same day. Announcing the investigation, Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager stressed that the EC will examine whether troves of data collected on the activities of users of its social network give it an unfair edge in the classified ads sector.
Vestager noted that Facebook competes with other companies in the classified ads sector, and that it collects advertising data from these companies. According to the investigation announcement, companies may provide Facebook with commercially valuable data when advertising their services on Facebook, which Facebook might then use in order to compete against the companies which provided it.
Adapting offers
The problem lies with Facebook Marketplace, a classified ads service rolled out in 2016 and closely integrated in Facebook’s social network. Following a preliminary investigation, after receiving complaints from Facebook’s competitors, the Commission became concerned that the company was using data obtained from its competitors in order to outcompete them.
An example of such abuse would be receiving precise information on users’ preferences from another company’s advertising activities, and then use this data on users to adapt the offers the user sees on Facebook Marketplace.
In recent months, the Commission asked Facebook’s rivals to remove all confidential information from their submissions to the EU antitrust authority, which is usually done before the Commission sends the company under investigation a sanitised statement of objections detailing apparent breaches of EU antitrust laws.
If found to be in breach of the EU rules on anticompetitive agreements between companies and the abuse of a dominant position, Meta could be fined up to 10% of its global turnover recorded in the previous year – in Meta’s case, up to 11.7 billion dollars.
