Europe’s latest attacks on Meta and Amazon make no sense – the information | Popgen Tech

Whose side are Europe’s antitrust regulators on? Of course not consumers. Today’s European Commission settlement with Amazon, which includes provisions that could erode the effectiveness of the company’s Prime service, follows in the footsteps of the case the agency laid out Monday against Meta Platforms’ Facebook Marketplace. In that case, European antitrust bureaucrats seem determined to undermine the one truly useful service on the social network — all because it makes life difficult for competing classified ad services. We don’t want competing services to compete too hard!

People use Facebook Marketplace to sell used furniture and similar items cheaply. It costs nothing to use, which means it’s not a big part of Facebook’s business. But it is popular among users. Part of the EC’s complaint is that Meta Marketplace “binds” to the social network. “Users of Facebook automatically have access to Facebook Marketplace, whether they want it or not,” the EC said in its statement of objections. Um, hello? You can understand regulators objecting to the practice of tying when, say, a dominant company forces consumers to buy a product they don’t want, one they do want. But both Facebook and Marketplace are free services. The EC’s complaint makes no sense.