The European Commission has fined Meta Platforms a total of €797 million ($842 million) over what it has described as abusive practices that allegedly benefitted Facebook Marketplace, which Meta owns and operates.
In a statement published on Thursday, the EC claimed that Meta had breached the EU’s antitrust rules “by tying its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers.”
In its ruling, the EU argued that Meta had imposed Facebook Marketplace on users of its social media platform in an illegal “tie.”
Meta has said that it would appeal the fine and argued that Brussels’ ruling ignored the fact that Facebook users had the option of choosing whether or not to engage with the Marketplace service.
Brussels had originally accused Meta of violating EU laws and opened formal proceedings into the company’s suspected anticompetitive practices in 2021. Concerns over Meta tying Facebook to its online classified ad services were raised in December 2022.
Earlier this year, EU antitrust regulators also accused Meta of violating the bloc’s Digital Markets Act by introducing a ‘pay or consent’ advertising model which gave its users the option of paying a subscription fee or allowing their data to be used for advertising.
The EC argued that the “binary choice” forced Facebook users to consent to the use of their personal data and failed to provide them with a “less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks.”
Meta, however, argued that its model was in line with the regulation and that it had been introduced specifically to comply with the EU’s ruling that it must get consent before showing ads to users or offer an “alternative” version of its services that does not rely on data collection for ads.