Meta was fined almost €800 million by the European Commission for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.
The European Union executive said Meta wrongly tied Facebook Marketplace to its social network Facebook and imposed unfair terms on rival ad providers, it said in a press release. Meta was ordered to halt these practices.
The company’s actions aimed “to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in an emailed statement.
The €798 million antitrust fine is the first for Meta, adding to a €110 million penalty in 2017 for failing to supply correct information during the EU’s merger review of the WhatsApp takeover. The Commission said Meta is the dominant player for personal social networks across the EU as well as national markets for online display ads on social media.
Meta will challenge the EU fine, it said in a blog post.
“We will comply, and will work quickly and constructively to launch a solution which addresses the points raised,” it said.
“It is disappointing that the Commission has chosen to take regulatory action against a free and innovative service built to meet consumer demand, particularly when senior European political figures are calling for the EU to be more competitive, innovative and forward-thinking,” it said.
Meta rivals complained that the firm unfairly linked its Marketplace online classified ads service to its social network and was using non-public advertising data to optimize Marketplace. The Commission opened an investigation in June 2021.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority last year ended its similar probe into Meta after the company agreed to change the way it uses advertisers’ data.
The fine comes just days after Meta bowed to pressure from antitrust and data-protection regulators and cut the price of its pay-or-consent model for its Facebook and Instagram services.
The Commission warned the company in July that its subscription plan risked breaching the DMA, saying this may not give users a real choice over how their data was processed. EU data protection authorities had also pushed the company to change the way its advertising model works.
German antitrust regulators found the company’s data collection practices abusive in 2017 and ordered it to stop tracking users outside of its social network.
Meta is separately challenging the Commission for labeling Marketplace as a core platform service under the DMA, which could prevent it from processing some data.
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