Facebook faces new antitrust investigation in Europe

The European Commission and the Britain’s Competition and Market Authority announced they started separate investigations into Facebook. The inquire aims at assessing whether Facebook’s Marketplace strategy is unfair and uncompetitive. The service is used by users to sell and buy products. The authorities intend to understand whether Facebook has unfairly used data collected from advertisers to help boost its Marketplace. The European Commission’s vice president executive vice president said that ‘Facebook collects vast troves of data on the activities of users of its social network and beyond, enabling it to target specific customer groups. We will look in detail whether this data gives Facebook an undue competitive advantage, in particular, on the online classified ads sector, where people buy and sell goods every day, and where Facebook also competes with companies from which it collects data. In today’s digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition.