The CJEU rules that Germany's Federal Cartel Office didn't overstep by demanding Meta overhaul its ad business in 2019; Meta says it is “evaluating” the ruling
The ruling lands amid a wider European regulatory campaign against Meta’s data and platform practices. Earlier coverage included an Irish privacy penalty over its advertising and data handling and a Commission objection over Marketplace’s connection to Facebook.
It also follows Meta’s unsuccessful effort to limit regulators’ access to antitrust evidence through a challenge to an EU data request. The court’s validation of the German authority strengthens the practical importance of national enforcement alongside the Commission’s Marketplace competition investigation.
First-order effects
Germany’s Federal Cartel Office retains the legal basis for its 2019 order requiring Meta to change the relevant parts of its advertising business; Meta must now assess compliance rather than rely on a jurisdictional challenge.
The decision gives the German authority a court-tested mandate in its case against Meta, while Meta’s European ad and data practices remain subject to overlapping competition and privacy scrutiny.
Second-order effects
Meta faces less room to treat competition, privacy, and advertising-data disputes as separate regulatory tracks; remedies in one area can shape its response in others.
Other large platforms operating in Germany face a clearer prospect that the national competition authority can pursue conduct linked to data practices, alongside EU-level cases such as the Commission’s Marketplace probe.
Third-order effects
If upheld enforcement continues, European platform oversight may increasingly combine competition analysis with the conditions under which dominant services collect and use data, rather than leaving those questions solely to privacy regulators.
The result points toward a more multi-authority compliance model for large platforms: national agencies can matter materially even when the European Commission is pursuing parallel cases.
The trend: Europe’s regulation of major digital platforms is converging competition enforcement, data governance, and marketplace conduct into interlocking oversight.
Today the #CJEU has largely declared Meta's approach to #GDPR “compliance” illegal. Meta is basically reduced to core services and consent for anything that goes beyond that. VERY good result as the CJEU (as before) simply applied the letter of the law. https://noyb.eu/...
I see a lot of breathless misleading reporting about CJEU's Meta judgment based on the press release. Especially this sentence, where the nuance is that it refers to off-platform data ("data at issue"). The question of first-party data is not that clear [image]
Momentous CJEU judgment today, creating new jurisprudence at the intersection of antitrust & data protection law by deciding that an abuse of dominant position in digital markets can be found by an antitrust authority due to a breach of the #GDPR https://curia.europa.eu/... 1/
Happy “independence-from-Meta's-surveillance- capitalism-day”! (h/t @riptari) As major EU court CJEU ruling confirms that Meta's invasive data harvesting for ad profit without people's consent is *not* legal. https://techcrunch.com/...
@VeraJourova ... 1/ Not really. Take the case of @meta for example. Today the @EUCourtPress ruled in Case C-252/21 https://curia.europa.eu/... I'm in the UK. Consider that ruling then consider Meta's response to me wrt to the same issues in the ruling I would suggest that Meta's …
#CJEU on Meta's data collection: “personalised advertising by which [...] Facebook finances its activity, cannot justify, as a legitimate interest [...], the processing of the data [...] in the absence of the data subject's consent “https://curia.europa.eu/...
This ( https://curia.europa.eu/... / https://curia.europa.eu/...) is nonsense to me, but not surprising: Continental Can (1973) broke the causal link between dominance and abuse ( https://www.networklawreview.org/ ...). We logically end up with this poor decision. Next step: infr…
Judgment of the Court in Meta Platforms and Others (General terms of use of a social network) A national competition authority can find, in the context of the examination of an abuse of a dominant position, that the GDPR has been infringed. See https://curia.europa.eu/... [image]
1/ What must you know about today's potentially momentous decision from the EU's highest court (CJEU) in Meta's case? (Case C-252/21) TLDR: personalized advertising under the GDPR may get even more tricky, but this is not the end.
This is “#GDPR meltdown day” for @Meta - CJEU basically closes all “loopholes” their lawyers have argued for the last five years. We have put together a (very) first statement here: https://noyb.eu/... https://twitter.com/...
Big news from CJEU with three key components: 1. Competition authorities can assess #GDPR compliance when investigating abuse of dominant position. 2. Legitimate interest, in the absence of consent, may not be a sufficient legal basis for personalised ads. [image]
🍿 This is big. A number of Competition Authorities are seriously tackling the abuse of privacy esp wrt to mobile .. via examining architectures of choice, browser and search engine defaults, deceptive design etc 💪 https://twitter.com/...
This is a case concerning a decision by the Federal German Antitrust regulator against Meta. The case refers to the combined processing of on-platform and off-platform data to create profiles relied on for targeted advertising without valid GDPR consent. 2/