(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. accused the European Union’s antitrust authority of acting like “a fishing super trawler” by netting vast amounts of “wholly irrelevant” documents in an attempt to build a case against the U.S. tech giant.
The commission was “hoovering up the whole sea bed — with the intention that it will later see what species of rare fish it finds within its vast nets,” Daniel Jowell, a lawyer for Meta, told a five-judge panel of the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Wednesday in a clash that turns the tables on regulators who often express concerns over data-collection practices of Meta’s Facebook social network.
Meta accused the commission of refusing to engage with the firm and ignoring its suggested alternatives to render the data requests more “proportionate” and limited to what is necessary. Instead, the commission “sailed obliviously onward,” using a “mechanical application of its search terms despite being on notice of the vast number of irrelevant documents this was bound to give rise to,” Jowell told the court.
Read More: Facebook Data Trove Probed as Europe Turns Screw on Big Tech
The EU decisions seeking information were the outcome of a long process in which antitrust officials tried to get information from Meta to investigate “seven anti-competitive practices,” Giuseppe Conte, a lawyer for the commission, told the court. The number of documents the commission received from Meta at the start “was very limited,” which is why the EU changed its approach, he said.
The commission in 2021 opened an in-depth probe into Meta to see if the firm misused a trove of data gathered from advertisers to compete against them in classified ads. It said it will also check if the company unfairly ties its Marketplace small ad service to the social network.
The cases are T-451/20 and T-452/20 Facebook Ireland v Commission.
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