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upstart writes:

Meta's ad business slapped with interim measures in France over suspected antitrust abuse:

More regulatory woes for Meta: France's competition watchdog has announced interim measures on the adtech giant — saying it suspects it of abusing a dominant position in the French market for ads on social media and across the broader (non-search-related) online ads market.

It's ordering Meta to suspend application of the current criteria it imposes for granting ad verification partnerships; and giving it two months to define and publish new rules for accessing and maintaining viewability and brand safety partnerships which the Authority specifies must be "objective, transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate".

Meta must also have a transparent access procedure for the partnerships that is not based on an invitation it sends, the order also stipulates.

The antitrust intervention follows a complaint by Adloox, a French ad verification platform that sells anti-ad-fraud and brand safety services. It complained to the Autorité de la Concurrence about Meta's conduct between 2016 and 2022, accusing the company of denying it the same kind of access to its ecosystem that some of its competitors have been granted, harming its ability to provide its services.

Adloox claims Meta discriminatorily denied it access to the aforementioned viewability and brand safety partnerships — despite providing such access to other companies in similar circumstances.

It also accuses Meta of abusing a dominant position by imposing unfair access conditions by providing only partial access to its ecosystem. And its complaint asked the Autorité to impose interim measures intended to force Meta to provide the sought for access.

The French regulator, which has taken a preliminary view that Meta's practices are likely to break competition rules, notes in a press release that Adloox's last request to Meta, in August 2022, went unanswered.

"The Authority considers that Meta's practices are likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant position," the regulator writes in a statement [translated from French using machine translation]. "In light of the investigation, the Authority considered that Meta is likely to hold a dominant position on the French market for online advertising on social media as well as on the broader market for online advertising not linked to search. Given the importance of the advertising investments made on Meta's platform, Meta is perceived as a key partner for independent auditors."

Practices by Meta that the regulator is calling out as likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant position are 1): The lack of defined and transparent objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate criteria for accessing and maintaining viewability and brand safety partnerships — with the Autorité saying the company integrated its current partners "following an opaque procedure initiated by Meta alone". And while it notes Meta informed it of new eligibility criteria for the partnerships at the start of this year it points out these are still not public, nor do they appear to pass muster in other aspects, with the regulator pointing out they are still intended to be implemented as part of an (i.e. opaque) invitation system and suggesting they seem "both disproportionate and unjustified".

Secondly, the Autorité says Meta's refusal of partnership access to Adloox is likely to be discriminatory, given its assessment that the third party is in an equivalent situation to others that have been granted access by Meta.

Original Submission