EU Charges Meta With Antitrust Violations Linked to Marketplace

The commission said it is also concerned that Meta imposes unfair conditions on competing classified-advertising services that use Facebook or Instagram, which is also owned by Meta. The company’s terms and conditions authorize Meta to use advertising data from third parties to benefit its Marketplace service, the commission said.

The EU first opened an investigation into the Marketplace service last year.

“Meta reaches globally billions of monthly users and millions of active advertisers” through Facebook, said

Margrethe Vestager,

who leads the bloc’s competition enforcement. By tying Facebook to the company’s classified-ad service, she said, “Facebook users have no choice but to have access to Facebook Marketplace.”

Meta said it disputes the commission’s charges. It said Facebook users that automatically get access to Marketplace are free to decide if they want to use it. The company said Marketplace offers an alternative to large and established e-commerce advertisers such as

Amazon.com Inc.

and that it doesn’t use data from other classified-ad services to compete with them. 

“We will continue to work with regulatory authorities to demonstrate that our product innovation is pro-consumer and pro-competitive,” said Tim Lamb, Meta’s head of competition for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The charges against Meta are part of a wave from the EU’s antitrust regulators in recent years. The EU last year filed antitrust charges against

Apple Inc.

for allegedly abusing its control over the distribution of music-streaming apps, including Spotify. It has also opened probes into other companies, including an investigation into allegations that

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google abuses its leading role in the digital advertising sector.

In the EU, the European Commission has been investigating Meta for years on multiple fronts. Facebook and the commission have squabbled over access to internal documents as part of those investigations.

The U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, in March separately opened its investigation into whether Meta repurposes the data it gathers from advertisers who buy ads to benefit its own services, including both its marketplace and its dating service. The CMA case is ongoing.

Meta will have an opportunity to argue its case before the commission makes a final decision. If the commission concludes the company breached antitrust rules, Meta could face a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue.

The EU separately on Monday said that it was closing its investigation into whether Meta and Google sought to illegally cooperate in digital advertising, a second time those claims have been dropped, after a U.S. court tossed them out in September.

The EU had announced in March it would investigate a deal between the two companies called Jedi Blue, which emerged as part of a lawsuit brought two years ago by a group of U.S. states led by Texas.

But a U.S. court in September tossed out the claims pertaining to the ad agreement. On Monday, the European Commission said that it would drop the case because, after collecting evidence from the two companies and the ad tech sector, the regulator “concluded that the evidence did not confirm its initial concerns.”

Google and Meta have disputed the characterization of their deal as potentially anticompetitive.

Write to Kim Mackrael at [email protected] and Sam Schechner at [email protected]