Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, ETR:FB2A, SWX:FB) has been fined €798 million by the European Union for forcing advertisers onto its Marketplace platform.
Brussels said that by embedding Marketplace into its social network it had imposed “unfair trading conditions” on other classified ad service providers.
Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s competition chief said Meta had linked Facebook with its classified ads service to benefit its own service Facebook Marketplace.
“This is illegal,” she added.
Meta said it would appeal the fine, stating: We built Marketplace in response to consumer demand — this decision ignores the market realities, and will only serve to protect incumbent marketplaces from competition.”
“The European Commission’s decision provides no evidence of competitive harm to rivals or any harm to consumers.”
Europe launched the investigation into Meta in 2019 after complaints from rivals.
Vestager is due to leave the European Commission shortly after ten years in the role of competition chief, an era that has seen increasingly heavy fines for competition breaches levied against a raft of Big Tech companies.
Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta have all received fines of hundreds of millions of euros for issues ranging from abuse of dominant positions to unpaid taxes.
Facebook launched Marketplace in 2016 as a platform to buy and sell second-hand goods competing with eBay.