EU charges Meta in latest hit on Big Tech
Al Jazeera
Mandatory ‘pay or consent’ advertising model violates Digital Markets Act, says Brussels.
The European Commission (EC) has charged Meta with breaching the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) via its new “pay or consent” advertising model.
The charge announced on Monday follows the tech giant’s launch of the no-ads subscription service for Facebook and Instagram in Europe last November. The move is the European Union executive’s latest against Big Tech since the DMA came into force earlier this year.
Meta offers users a choice between being targeted by ads based on their personal data or paying to avoid them. The system was rolled out after the EU ruled that Meta must get consent before showing ads to users – a decision that threatened its business model of tailoring ads based on individual users’ online interests and digital activity.
However, the EC said that this binary choice does not give users the option to “freely consent” to the combination of their personal data from various Meta-operated sites.
It also found in a preliminary investigation that Meta fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of the social networks.
