Europe’s misguided hostility towards Pay or Okay
On Monday, the European Commission announced that it is launching investigations into Alphabet, Apple, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Meta is being investigated for the “Pay or Okay” model it introduced last October in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. From the EC’s press release:
Finally, the Commission has opened proceedings against Meta to investigate whether the recently introduced “pay or consent” model for users in the EU complies with Article 5(2) of the DMA which requires gatekeepers to obtain consent from users when they intend to combine or cross-use their personal data across different core platform services … The Commission is concerned that the binary choice imposed by Meta’s “pay or consent” model may not provide a real alternative in case users do not consent, thereby not achieving the objective of preventing the accumulation of personal data by gatekeepers.
I covered Meta’s evolution in the EU last year in detail as the company navigated the various legal bases for data processing under the GDPR until arriving at “Pay or Okay.” I provide a history of Meta’s reactions to various privacy decisions in the EU, starting in January 2023, in Meta, subscriptions, and the EU’s Privacy Gordian Knot. For a more in-depth review, see:
