EU reportedly set to open formal antitrust probe into Facebook

European regulators are reportedly set to open a formal probe into whether Facebook has violated antitrust laws by undermining rivals in the classified advertising market.

The European Commission has already sent questionnaires to Facebook and its rivals asking whether the tech giant is warping the classified advertising business by promoting its online marketplace for free to its users, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. Facebook is one of the few US Big Tech companies that’s managed to escape formal antitrust scrutiny from the European Union so far. The EU had previously investigated Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google, with most of those probes launched in the past couple of years.