EU regulators accused Facebook parent firm Meta on Monday of violating the historic antitrust laws of the bloc about its newly launched ad-supported social networking site.
According to a statement made public today, consumers cannot exercise their “right to freely consent” to the combining of their data under this paradigm.
The accusations against the US tech giant come after a ruling against Apple last week, which was the first time official proceedings under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) had been brought by Brussels.
The ad-supported subscription option was dubbed a “pay or consent” model by the European Commission, the EU’s executive body.
This means that users must either pay to use Meta’s platforms without advertisements or give their approval to have their data processed for targeted advertising.
The European Commission asserted that users do not have the option to “freely consent” to the fusion of their personal information from different Meta-operated websites when presented with this binary choice.
A preliminary examination also showed that Meta is unable to offer users a comparable, but less customised, version of the social networks.
In Europe, the service was first made available for Facebook and Instagram a year ago.
“This binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta’s social networks,” the EU’s powerful antitrust regulator said in a statement.
In March of this year, the EU’s Digital Markets Act, or DMA, came into force.
The goal of the regulation is to force big digital corporations to stop engaging in anti-competitive behaviour and to make some of their services available to competitors.
Under the DMA, businesses risk hefty fines that might equal up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue.
That percentage may increase to 20% for recurrent violations.
We earlier reported in compliance with the European Union’s Digital Market Act Regulation, Apple has released iOS 17.4 update and released a new API called FinanceKit.
