EU issues €797M antitrust fine to Meta over Facebook Marketplace

The European Union today issued a fine of €797.72 million, or about $840 million, to Meta Platforms Inc. over the way it operates its Facebook Marketplace e-commerce service.

Officials have also ordered the company to change some of its business practices.

Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace enables users of Meta’s flagship social network to buy and sell goods. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, launched a probe into the service in 2021 over concerns it may harm competition. Today’s fine is the culmination of that probe.

According to the European Commission, Meta breached the bloc’s antitrust rules in two ways.

The first issue is the fact that Facebook Marketplace is built into Facebook. All Facebook users receive access to the service and “get regularly exposed” to it, the European Commission found. The probe determined that this integration gives Facebook Marketplace a go-to-market advantage over rivals.

The other motivation behind today’s fine relates to Meta’s data collection practices. According to the EU, the company can gather information about the ads that e-commerce rivals run across its social networks and use it to boost Facebook Marketplace.

Besides ordering Meta to pay a fine, the EU has also instructed it to change the practices that were found to breach competition rules.

Meta stated in a blog post today that it plans to file an appeal. The antitrust decision “argues that Meta could use advertising data from rival marketplaces that advertise on Facebook to compete against them with Facebook Marketplace,” the company stated. “But we don’t use advertisers’ data for this purpose and we have already built systems and controls to ensure that.”

The fine is the latest of several that EU regulators have issued to the company over the past two years. 

The Irish Data Protection Authority, which oversees Meta’s privacy practices in the EU, ordered the Facebook parent to pay €1.2 billion last May. The penalty was issued over the way the company transferred EU users’ data to its stateside data centers. More recently, the same regulator fined Meta €91 million in September for a cybersecurity issue that came to light about five years ago. 

The Facebook parent could potentially face yet more EU fines in the future. In July, the European Commission tentatively found that the company had breached the bloc’s DMA tech industry regulation with a recently launched subscription plan. The service allows users to opt out of data collection and targeted ads on Meta’s social networks. 

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