Meta fined €800m for breach of EU competition law

Meta Platforms has been fined nearly €800 million by the European Commission over “abusive practices” benefiting Facebook Marketplace, its online classified ads service.
The European Union regulator said Meta had breached competition rules by tying the ads business to the Facebook social network, which the commission claimed gave Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage over rivals.
Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said Meta’s practices gave it “advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match”. She added: “This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. Meta must now stop this behaviour.”
The commission has fined Meta €797.72 million (£663 million).
Meta said it would appeal against the decision. In the meantime, it said it would comply and would work quickly and constructively to launch a solution that addressed the points raised.
The technology group, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp and is led by Mark Zuckerberg, said that the ruling fails to prove any “competitive harm” to rivals or consumers and “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services”.
It said the decision also ignores the fact that Facebook users can choose whether to “engage with Marketplace, and many don’t”.
• Frames, friends and frights: my foray into Facebook Marketplace
Online marketplaces such as eBay and Vinted, the platform for second-hand clothes, are continuing to grow.
Facebook launched Marketplace in 2016 and expanded into several European countries a year later. The EU opened formal proceedings into possible anticompetitive conduct of Facebook in June 2021. Companies risk fines of up to 10 per cent of their global turnover for EU antitrust violations.
The fine is the latest in a series of clampdowns on Meta’s influence by the EU. Meta has delayed launching its latest AI model in the region, blaming the “unpredictable” behaviour of regulators there.
Last year the tech company was fined €1.2 billion for breaching EU data privacy rules. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said Meta had violated EU rules when it moved the personal data of European Facebook users to the United States, where it is hosted, without protecting them sufficiently from Washington’s data surveillance practices. Meta’s European headquarters are in Dublin.
In America, Meta is being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly overpaying for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to crush emerging competition and maintain its social network monopoly. Meta has said it can demonstrate that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp “have been good for competition and consumers”.
The leaders of America’s biggest technology companies are hoping for a friendly regulatory environment during the second Donald Trump administration. After Trump’s election victory last week, Zuckerberg, who chose not to support a candidate during the election race, issued a public statement congratulating the president-elect. He said: “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you.”
Big technology groups are also hoping for a change of approach in the EU, where Vestager is due to step down as competition commissioner later this year after a decade of hitting US technology companies with big fines. She will be replaced by Teresa Ribera, Spain’s environment minister, who will be tasked with supporting European businesses and reining in tech companies.
Meta shares slipped $3.03, or 0.5 per cent, to $576.97 in pre-market trading in New York.