Facebook ends again in the crosshairs of the European Antitrust. The umpteenth chapter in the saga on the competition of the American tech giant in the Old Continent sees once again the protagonist the vice president of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, who has the delegation precisely to the Antitrust and who communicated that Brussels is opening a formal investigation for evaluate whether the social network created by Mark Zuckerberg has violated EU competition rules by using advertising data collected in particular from advertisers to compete with them in markets where Facebook is active, such as classified ads. In fact, through the Facebook Marketplace platform, Facebook competes – this is Vestager's thesis – in fact with other competing companies, including the very many that advertise through the social network.
If the thesis were to prove to be founded, then Facebook's action would be considered in violation of European competition rules. “Facebook – writes Vestager – is used by almost 3 billion people on a monthly basis and nearly 7 million companies advertise on Facebook, in total. The social network therefore collects large amounts of data on users' activities, allowing them to target specific customer groups. “We will examine in detail – continues the press release of the vice president of the commission – whether these data give Facebook an undue competitive advantage, particularly in the online classifieds industry, where people buy and sell goods every day, and where Facebook also competes with the companies it collects data from. In today's digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition."
“When they advertise their services on Facebook, companies, which also compete directly with Facebook, can provide them commercially valuable data. Facebook could then use this data to compete with the companies that provided it”, finally argues the Commission.
