Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been hit with yet another huge regulatory fine in Europe, this time over abusive practices related to Facebook Marketplace. The European Commission announced that it would fine Meta €797.72 million — nearly $840 million — for breaching EU antitrust rules connected to how it ties its online classified ads service, Facebook Marketplace, to Facebook itself, creating “unfair trading conditions” for other providers of classifieds online.
The fine is the latest instalment of a case that dates back to June 2021. In December 2022, the regulators had determined that Facebook Marketplace violated antitrust rules. Today, it’s issuing the penalty for that violation.
“Today we fine Meta €797.72 million for abusing its dominant positions in the markets for personal social network services and for online display advertising on social media platforms,” Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy, said in a statement.
“Meta tied its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers. It did so to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace, thereby giving it advantages that other online classified ads service providers could not match. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. Meta must now stop this behaviour.”
Facebook has been quick to respond, saying that it will appeal the ruling. “This decision ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services and shields large incumbent companies from a new entrant, Facebook Marketplace, that meets consumer demand in innovative and convenient new ways,” the company wrote in a statement.
Meta has cumulatively faced billions of dollars in fines in Europe for a variety of infringements over the last several years. In September it was fined over $100 million related to a security breach in which user passwords were exposed. In January 2023, it was fined more than $400 million across a series of violations.
In May 2023, it was fined over $1 billion related to GDPR violations. Separately, it has faced other legal issues in Europe. In December 2023, we reported that it was facing a $600 million damages claim in Spain related to a privacy breach case. Regulatory cases can take years to complete, and Meta is in various stages of appeals around these fines.
Some of these eventually do lead to the company paying up. In the U.S. it settled with the FTC in a 2019 case where it paid up $5 billion and put new privacy practices in place.
Fines are calculated on a sliding scale but can amount to up to 30% of a company’s sales in the relevant category, the European Commission says.
The fine comes at a time when tides are changing fast in politics, not least because of the changing of the guard in the U.S., with the executive and legislative branches now all controlled by the Republicans.
Some of that could have repercussions in regulation, and how Big Tech is regulated, not just in the U.S. but further afield. So far observers have named cybersecurity, M&A, and cryptocurrency as areas that might be revisited; it will be worth watching to see how social media, data protection and privacy — three areas that concern Meta — are treated in the years to come.
