EU and UK launch antitrust probe on Facebook in Europe | European Union news

The European Commission has said it will investigate whether Facebook uses a lot of data collected from advertisers to compete against them in classified ads.

Facebook Inc. It faces the first in-depth probe conducted by European regulators, the latest in an effort to remove the market dominance of major technologies across the continent.

The European Commission has said it will investigate whether Facebook uses a lot of data collected from advertisers to compete against them in classified ads. The company will also check that the small Marketplace ad service is unfairly connecting to the social network.

At the same time, the UK said it was opening probes in the Facebook Marketplace and Dating services after the German monopoly guard announced a case targeting the Google News Showcase product.

The cases open up another front for the world’s largest tech companies to fight, as regulators investigate the strength of their market in a pandemic when online commerce and advertising are much more important for people working from home. Germany already has Facebook and Amazon.com Inc. is being investigated while France examines the advertising practices of Google and Apple Inc.

Opening a formal probe means that regulators can begin to build strong evidence of antitrust violations, a process that could lead to a charge sheet or statement of objection, and eventually order harsh fines or an order to change the way the business operates.

Shares of Facebook rose less than 1% to $ 328.1 at 9:47 a.m. Friday in New York City. The stock gained about 20.2% this year.

The move by the EU on Friday is the first time that the case of Facebook’s behavior has escalated. It follows other high-profile cases against Google, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. for failing to provide direct information to Facebook when it was fined by the EU for reviewing the merger of WhatsApp.

“Facebook collects a lot of data about the activities of its social network and outside users,” said EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager. EU regulators will “scrutinize whether this data gives Facebook an inappropriate competitive advantage, especially in the online classified ads sector, where people buy and sell sales on a daily basis,” he said.

Online commerce has become increasingly important in the Facebook business during the pandemic as more people buy goods online.

“Commercial ads continue to perform very well and drive a significant amount of our overall business,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call in April. According to him, more than 1 billion people visit the Facebook Marketplace every month.

Facebook will “continue to fully cooperate with the investigations to prove that they have no merit,” the company said in an emailed note. “We are always developing new and better services to meet the evolving demand of people who use Facebook.

The UK’s antitrust regulator also opened up its own data on Facebook, examining the dating service that the Marketplace and the company launched in Europe last year.

The Competition and Markets Authority said it intended to investigate whether Facebook had abused its main position, including the only option to log in with data collection from services.

The CMA, which has more and more technology, is conducting independent research, but said it will work with the EU probe. The CMA said its initial investigation, among other things, will include the collection of information by February

The German Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Friday that it was reviewing the Google News Showcase to see if its terms offer “fair terms” to publishers. The move is reported by Andreas Mundt, head of the German monopoly, against attacks on Big Tech.

The EU study reflects an earlier survey conducted on Amazon, examining how a so-called digital platform can use data collected from companies that use its service to compete against them. The EU Commission has been investigating Facebook since 2019. Facebook wanted to reduce the number of probes with the courts to limit the information that officials could receive last year.