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
This report slots into a widening transatlantic file on Facebook's conduct. The European Commission's investigators had already sought internal Facebook documents over alleged efforts to squash potential rivals, and weeks after this story the Commission opened a formal probe into Facebook's impact on the online classifieds market. The CMA preparing its own investigation signals the UK is running a parallel track on the same core allegation: customer data weaponized against competitors.
The timing matters because the CMA was about to prove this wasn't a one-off: months later it launched an inquiry into Facebook's Kustomer acquisition under the Enterprise Act 2002, and it planned an Amazon data-use investigation explicitly mirroring the EU probe. The Facebook data case looks like the template for how the post-Brexit CMA would operate.
First-order effects
- Facebook now faces coordinated scrutiny from two of Europe's largest competition authorities over the same alleged conduct — using customer data to disadvantage rivals in social media and online advertising — raising the prospect of overlapping remedies rather than one negotiated settlement.
Second-order effects
- The CMA's approach generalizes fast: the same watchdog moves from Facebook's data practices to an Amazon investigation modeled on the EU's, and to blocking review of the Kustomer acquisition — signaling that any large platform's data advantage and M&A pipeline are both fair game.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, regulators converge on 'data advantage' as the central theory of harm for platform markets, forcing ad-funded platforms to justify or firewall the data their user bases generate — and making multi-jurisdiction coordination, not any single national ruling, the binding constraint on platform strategy.
The trend: Competition authorities are converging on data advantage as their primary theory of harm against big platforms, with the UK's CMA deliberately mirroring EU investigations to amplify leverage.