Sources: UK's CMA is preparing an antitrust investigation into the way Facebook allegedly uses customer data to squash rivals in social media and online ads
Context & Ripple Effects
The CMA's move lands after EU antitrust investigators spent over a year pressing the same theory, having sought internal Facebook documents related to alleged efforts to squash potential rivals in their deepened inquiry into internal documents. The UK is now joining that line of attack, targeting how customer data feeds Facebook's positions in both social media and online ads.
What follows in the corpus shows this was the opening move of a broader sweep: the European Commission later opened a formal probe into Facebook's conduct in online classifieds, and by summer the same watchdog had turned to acquisitions, with an inquiry into the Kustomer deal under the Enterprise Act. The data-use question was becoming the organizing complaint across jurisdictions.
First-order effects
- Facebook now faces a second major European regulator examining its data practices, meaning discovery demands, document production, and legal costs multiply alongside the EU case already in motion.
- Rivals in social media and online ads gain a live regulatory channel for their complaints, since a CMA investigation gives them a forum to submit evidence of data-based foreclosure.
Second-order effects
- The CMA's approach becomes a template other cases copy — its subsequent plan to investigate Amazon over collected data explicitly mirrored the EU probe, suggesting UK-EU coordination rather than isolated action.
- Facebook's M&A comes under the same lens: once data advantage is the stated harm, acquisitions like Kustomer get scrutinized as extensions of it, as the CMA's own Kustomer inquiry and the Commission's follow-on review show.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform antitrust enforcement consolidates around data use as the core theory of harm — shifting scrutiny from market share and pricing to how incumbents recycle user data across adjacent markets like classifieds and ad tech.
- Multi-jurisdictional sequencing (EU first, UK following, then deal-level reviews) points toward de facto coordinated supervision of large platforms, raising the compliance bar for any data-driven expansion strategy.
The trend: Competition regulators are converging on customer-data exploitation as their primary theory of harm against big tech platforms, with the UK and EU running parallel investigations that extend from conduct into acquisitions.