18/05/2017
Today the European Commission fined Facebook €110 million for inaccurately claiming during the review of its then-proposed acquisition of WhatsApp that it could not match Facebook and WhatsApp user accounts, something the company started doing two years later.
There are two key takeaways from the Commission's decision.
First, this is but the latest case in which a Silicon Valley company is found to have violated antitrust procedures. While Margrethe Vestager, the EU Commissioner for Antitrust, has been roughly as permissive as its predecessors in terms of merger clearing, she has taken a stronger stance towards complying "with all aspects of EU mergers rules", as she remarked after the announcement of the fine.
Secondly, Facebook, whose business practices have faced relatively little scrutiny in the US, as least in connection to its takeover of WhatsApp, has to tread a much finer line in Europe, where some of the steps it has taken to more tightly integrate WhatsApp with the rest of its products had, for instance, already come under fire in Germany, which prohibited any sharing of information between the messaging service and its parent company.
Facebook was fined $122.7 million by the EU’s antitrust regulator for misleading authorities over the acquisition of its messaging unit WhatsApp, firing a warning shot to other companies.