Whose side are Europe’s antitrust regulators on? Obviously not consumers’. Today’s European Commission settlement with Amazon, which includes provisions that could erode the efficiency of the company’s Prime service, follows in the footsteps of the case the agency outlined against Meta Platforms’ Facebook Marketplace on Monday. In that case, European antitrust bureaucrats seem determined to undermine the one genuinely useful service on the social network—all because it makes life difficult for competing classified ad services. We wouldn’t want rival services to have to compete too hard!
People use Facebook Marketplace to sell used furniture and similar items for cheap. It doesn’t cost anything to use, which means it’s not a major part of Facebook’s business. But it’s popular with users. Part of the EC’s complaint is that Meta is “tying” Marketplace 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 to get one they do want. But both Facebook and Marketplace are free services. The EC’s complaint doesn’t make sense.
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