Sources: EU antitrust regulators are likely to launch an investigation into Facebook's acquisition of Kustomer after an initial review ends next month
EU antitrust regulators are likely to kick off a full-scale investigation into Facebook's (FB.O) acquisition of U.S. customer service startup Kustomer …
Context & Ripple Effects
The EU's move would extend a pattern already underway on both sides of the Atlantic: the UK's CMA opened an inquiry into the Kustomer deal under the Enterprise Act just a day earlier, and Brussels has a separate formal probe into whether Facebook undermines competition in online classifieds. The company has been under sustained antitrust scrutiny for years, going back to when it disclosed that the FTC had opened an antitrust investigation in 2019.
First-order effects
- Facebook's acquisition of customer-service startup Kustomer faces a second-phase review with an extended timeline and possible remedies or block, after an initial EU review ending next month.
Second-order effects
- Rival acquirers of small SaaS and CRM startups now have to price in multi-jurisdiction reviews — the UK's Enterprise Act inquiry and the Commission's probe running in parallel — which raises deal costs and delays integration for every buyer in the category.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'capability acquisitions' — big platforms buying small software firms to extend their product surface — become the next front in platform antitrust, with regulators scrutinizing data adjacency rather than market-share overlap alone.
The trend: Antitrust authorities in the US, UK, and EU are converging on a coordinated posture toward platform acquisitions, turning even sub-scale deals like Kustomer into multi-jurisdiction tests.