The EU General Court dismisses Meta's challenge to EU regulators seeking vast amounts of data in an antitrust case; Meta first opposed the request in 2020
Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta has been fighting a multi-front legal war over European regulators' access to its internal data. A 2020 court ruling said the EU couldn't force Facebook to hand over potentially sensitive information without a detailed review — the decision this new case builds against — and Meta first opposed this data request that same year.
The General Court's dismissal lands amid an accelerating enforcement squeeze: two days earlier the EU hit Meta with a record €1.2B GDPR fine over US data transfers, and six weeks later the CJEU would rule that Germany's Federal Cartel Office was within its rights when it demanded an overhaul of Meta's ad business. Courts are repeatedly siding with regulators who want deeper visibility into how Meta operates.
First-order effects
- Meta loses its procedural shield from the 2020 ruling era and must comply with the Commission's demand for vast amounts of internal data for the antitrust investigation, removing years of delay it had bought since first opposing the request.
Second-order effects
- The ruling hands national enforcers like Germany's Federal Cartel Office a template: if the General Court accepts sweeping data demands, other agencies can escalate their own evidence requests without fearing the same judicial pushback Meta relied on.
Third-order effects
- Antitrust cases against large platforms are structurally shifting toward data-forcing investigations, where regulators' ability to compel granular internal records — rather than market definitions alone — decides what they can prove; Meta's mixed record before these courts (this dismissal versus the later partial reversal of its Marketplace gatekeeper designation in the DMA annulment) shows outcomes vary but the evidentiary bar keeps rising.
The trend: European courts are progressively legitimizing regulators' power to compel platforms' internal data, making raw data access itself the central battleground of EU antitrust enforcement.