And anyway the EU never had specific legislation at the time Marketplace was introduced hence why they are having to use the EEA agreement as the basis for their actions. Which is basically a generic "do nothing bad" clause.
It has everything to do with Consumer protection. Meta tied its online classified ad business to its social network, automatically exposing Facebook users to Marketplace without any question of consent.
It then exacerbated this by imposing unfair trading conditions with a terms of service that authorised the company to use ad-related data — generated from competitors who advertise on Facebook or Instagram — to benefit Marketplace.
The reason the use EEA legislation is presumably because Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are EEA but not EU states, but fall under scope here.
> automatically exposing Facebook users to Marketplace without any question of consent.
I simply cannot even comprehend the kind of entity/mind that sees this as an issue. How does the EU even get anything done?
Think of the poor users! "Exposed" to Facebook Marketplace, oh the humanity! How evil of a company to link to their own services on their own website! We must regulate the links!
This ridiculous mentality is why the EU has strangled its tech space to death, why it has missed out on trillions from the mobile era and will miss out on trillions from the AI era, why all of your best engineers come to the US, and why the EU has completely and utterly failed in consumer facing technology.
The EU is more interested in hand wringing and manufactured moral panic than actually getting shit done. Marketplace in Facebook feeds? So what? Like, who gives a shit? The users certainly don't. It works, people like it, ship it, move on. God, what a suffocating bureaucracy.
And anyway the EU never had specific legislation at the time Marketplace was introduced hence why they are having to use the EEA agreement as the basis for their actions. Which is basically a generic "do nothing bad" clause.