European Union and British regulators are investigating whether Facebook’s “vast troves of data” give Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage.

Facebook Faces Two Antitrust Inquiries in Europe

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2021-06-05 13:00:08

European Union and British regulators are investigating whether Facebook’s “vast troves of data” give Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage.

LONDON — European Union and British regulators said on Friday that they were beginning separate antitrust inquiries into Facebook, broadening their efforts to rein in the world’s largest technology companies.

The investigations by the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-nation union, and Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority take aim at a key business strategy used by Facebook and other large tech companies: to use their size and power in one area to enter others. Amazon used its position as the largest online retailer to become a major player in video streaming. Apple leveraged the iPhone to create one of the world’s largest mobile payment systems with Apple Pay. Google has parlayed its dominance as a search engine into many different areas.

The regulators said they would start formal investigations of Facebook Marketplace, an eBay-like classifieds service introduced in 2016 for users to buy and sell products. Under scrutiny is whether Facebook unfairly used data collected from advertisers to help boost Marketplace to the more than two billion users of its main social network, giving it an unfair advantage over rivals in violation of European Union competition laws. Britain is also looking into Facebook Dating, a service the company introduced in Europe last year.

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