Following the UK's CMA, European Commission is launching an investigation into Facebook's acquisition of Kustomer with a deadline of December 22 for a ruling
- EU sets Dec. 22 deadline to examine customer-service software — EU will also examine Facebook's ad-targeting “data advantage”
Context & Ripple Effects
The European Commission is formalizing what sources said was likely after the initial review: a Phase 2-style probe of Facebook's acquisition of Kustomer, the customer-service software maker, with a December 22 deadline for a ruling. It lands one day after the CMA opened its own inquiry under the Enterprise Act, making this a two-jurisdiction review of a deal that closed quietly elsewhere.
The EU's stated scope matters as much as the timeline — it will examine Facebook's ad-targeting 'data advantage', echoing the concern behind the CMA's earlier look at how Facebook allegedly uses customer data against rivals and the coordinated EU-UK investigations into Marketplace and Facebook Dating. Regulators are treating Facebook's acquisitions as data-aggregation questions, not just market-share ones.
First-order effects
- Facebook now faces parallel UK and European Commission reviews of the Kustomer deal on overlapping timelines, with the EU explicitly putting its cross-service data advantage in scope rather than just the CRM market.
Second-order effects
- Future Facebook purchases of adjacent software companies become harder to price and close, since acquirers must assume regulators will scrutinize data combinations across properties, following the pattern set by the Marketplace and Dating probes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large-platform acquisitions of complementary software assets get assessed on data-concentration grounds by default, pushing deal structures toward licensing and partnerships over outright ownership.
The trend: Antitrust review of big-tech M&A is shifting from market-definition exercises to scrutiny of cross-property data aggregation, with EU and UK regulators moving in coordinated sequence.