BRUSELA, 19 (EUROPE PRESS)
The European Commission accused Facebook’s parent company Meta on Monday of favoring its social network in competition with online classified ads, for its use of its customers’ data and for the way it links this information with its own classified ads service, the Facebook Marketplace platform.
Brussels announced the opening of an antitrust investigation into this case last June and is now formalizing the indictment by sending the indictment report to the parties to report the details of the indictment. If Community Services concludes that the company has acted illegally, they can impose a fine of up to 10% of its global annual turnover.
“We are concerned that Meta has imposed unfair trading terms, which allow it to use the data in competing online classifieds services,” said Margrthe Vestager, Vice President of the Community Executive responsible for competition, who points out that by linking Facebook with classifieds users of the social network’s advertising platform “have no choice” but to have access to that service.
Vestager also points out that thanks to the social network Meta it manages to have access to “billions of users every month” and also to millions of active advertisers, so if Brussels’ suspicions about the way it uses this information, the American company will violate the rules of the European Union.
Specifically, Vestager services believes that Meta has abused its dominant position in two main ways, firstly through the way Facebook users automatically log into the Marketplace’s ad platform, which penalizes other competitors.
The Commission also considers that Meta unilaterally imposes unfair trading terms on competing online ad services advertising on Facebook or Instagram.
Community Services is concerned that the terms and conditions allowing Meta to use competitor-derived ad data for the benefit of Facebook Marketplace are “unjustified, disproportionate and unnecessary” for the provision of display advertising services on Meta platforms .
