LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) — Meta Platforms has chastised EU antitrust investigators for what it claims were “aberrant” requests for information during two investigations four years ago, highlighting the growing resistance by businesses against what they regard as excessive regulatory demands.
Meta, which has previously compared EU demands for its Facebook social network and online classified services to a fishing trawler, said the question was whether regulators’ authority was limited and if there was an effective judicial check on it.
The US computer behemoth had disputed the European Commission’s requests in a lower court but failed to persuade judges, prompting an appeal to Europe’s top court, the EU Court of Justice.
The records seized by the EU included autopsy reports on family members, school reports for children, information about individuals and their families, and even security data, Meta’s lawyer Daniel Jowell told the panel of five judges.
“These sorts of aberrant, intrusive and disproportionate requests should, in our respectful submission, never have been made,” he told us.
According to Jowell, the important question is whether the Commission’s authority to seek digital records “is effectively unlimited, or whether it is guided in a way that properly respects the principles of necessity, proportionality, and the fundamental right to privacy.”
According to Meta, the Commission employed around 2,500 search keywords in the data case and 600 search terms in the marketplace case, resulting in over 1 million documents.
Giuseppe Conte, a Commission lawyer, disputed Meta’s claims, claiming that the EU competition enforcer had essentially followed the company’s method to defining search keywords.
“A large part of the search terms of the contested decisions are the same as those that Meta itself selected on its own initial initiative to prepare its response to the March 2019 decision,” noted the judge.
“It is common practice for the Commission and indeed all competition authorities around the world to request the company being investigated to produce documents responsive to search terms,” according to Conte.
He also denied Meta’s claim of thousands of search phrases, claiming that there were just hundreds.
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The court is scheduled to rule next year.
Last year, the EU’s competition watchdog fined Meta 797.7 million euros ($923.6 million) for linking its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and imposed unfair trade terms on other online classified ads service providers.