European Commission Fines Meta for Serving Consumers
The European Commission recently fined Meta 798 million euros—about $841 million—for “tying” classified ads on Facebook Marketplace to social accounts on Facebook. The commission defines tying as requiring consumers who want to purchase one product to buy another as well. The commission has acknowledged that tying often gives consumers better products at lower cost, but it accuses Meta of “imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers.”
Meta’s punishment is yet another “huge antitrust fine against a leading American technology company,” says Joseph Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
The commission opened its investigation of Meta in June 2021, inquiring into the company’s collection of Facebook user data, which allows it to target consumers on Marketplace. (Such data collection was responsible for more than 99 percent of Meta’s $133 billion revenue in 2023, according to the company’s investor report.) The commission frets that these data afford Facebook an “undue competitive advantage” in “the online classified ads sector.”
The commission hypothesizes that Facebook may receive information on users’ preferences from its competitors’ advertisements. It is unclear what would be wrong with that, given that competitors pay Facebook to target advertisements to users based on data the platform already possesses. These competitors have also willingly signed on to Facebook’s terms and conditions, which authorize the company “to use ads-related data derived from competitors for the benefit of Facebook Marketplace”—a fact the
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