The European Union today issue a fine of €797.72 million, or about $840 million, to Meta Platforms Inc. for how it operates its Facebook Marketplace e-commerce service.

Officials ordered the company to change some of its business practices.

Launched in 2016, Facebook Marketplace allows users of Meta’s flagship social network to buy and sell goods. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, launched an investigation into the service in 2021 over fears it could harm competition. Today’s fine is the culmination of that investigation.

According to the European Commission, Meta violated the bloc’s antitrust rules in two ways.

The first problem is that Facebook Marketplace is integrated into Facebook. All Facebook users get access to the service and “are regularly exposed” to it, the European Commission found. The probe determined that this integration gives Facebook Marketplace a market access advantage over rivals.

The other motivation behind today’s fine relates to Meta’s data collection practices. According to the EU, the company can gather information about the ads that e-commerce rivals run on its social networks and use it to boost Facebook Marketplace.

In addition to forcing Meta to pay a fine, the EU also asked it to change practices that were found to be in breach of competition rules.

Meta stated in a blog post today that he intends to file an appeal. The antitrust ruling “holds that Meta could use ad data from rival marketplaces that advertise on Facebook to compete against them with Facebook Marketplace,” the company said. “But we don’t use advertiser data for that purpose, and we’ve already built in systems and controls to make sure that.”

The fine is the latest of several that EU regulators have issued to the company over the past two years.

The Irish Data Protection Authority, which oversees Meta’s privacy practices in the EU, orderly parent Facebook will pay 1.2 billion euros last May. The penalty was issued for the way the company transferred user data from the EU to its data centers in the United States. More recently, the same regulator FINED Meta EUR 91 million in September for a cyber security problem that arose about five years ago.

In the future, parent Facebook could face more EU fines. In July, the European Commission provisionally found that the company violated DMA technology industry regulations en bloc with a recently launched subscription plan. The service allows users to opt out of data collection and targeted advertising on Meta social networks.

Photo: Unsplash