Soccer goalwhat was once Facebook matrix, hasn’t hit a ball in months. The company had intended to resurface and relaunch with Metaverse, but said the universe had collapsed due to a lackluster start, a lack of enthusiasm among its own employees, a stock market crash, and the recent departure of John Carmack. Could it get any worse for Meta? The answer to this question is yes, if we see that the European Union decided in its first findings that the company abused its dominant position in favor of Facebook Marketplace.

Dive into the details The European Commission has confirmed that it is conducting an antitrust investigation into Meta over the way it links the social network Facebook and the Marketplace advertising service.. The commission’s statement of objections points to “unfair business conditions” related to the company’s use of data collected from competitors’ classified ad services.

The European Commission’s announcement comes eighteen months after the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced separate but joint investigations into whether Meta is abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market. A corporation led by Mark Zuckerberg would set specific conditions to gain an unfair advantage over the competition. The CMA already announced in August that it would continue its case against Meta, and the European Commission is now trying to follow the same line.

Launched in 2016, Marketplace allows any Facebook user to buy and sell almost anything, from clothes and books to smartphones and furniture. Nothing out of the ordinary yet, at least on the face of it, but the European Commission has ruled that Meta could be in breach of European Union antitrust rules by maneuvering to “distort competition in online advertising markets” by linking its advertising product to its social network if therefore, if the findings were confirmed, it would be a violation of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President responsible for competition policy at the European Commission, explained that Meta, with its Facebook social network, has “worldwide to billions of monthly users and millions of active advertisers. We are tentatively concerned that Meta is linking its dominant social network Facebook with its online advertising services called Facebook Marketplace. This means that Facebook users have no choice but to access the Facebook Marketplace.. In addition, we are concerned that Meta has implemented unfair business terms that allow it to use data from competing online advertising services. If confirmed, Meta’s practices would be illegal under our contest rules“.

The scope of the European Commission’s investigation also covers the classified advertising services of Meta’s competitors, which advertise on the company’s digital properties, which also include Instagram and Facebook. Through this channel, the commission has preliminarily decided that the conditions it imposes on other advertisers are unjustified and unreasonable. To find out, we’re looking at how Meta can leverage its competitors’ ad-related data to Marketplace’s advantage.

As we can see, Metai’s problems are piling up. If a violation of the anti-monopoly legislation of the European Union is confirmed, the company will have to face a fine, which will certainly affect the further decrease of its value on the stock exchange.