France’s antitrust authorities gave way on Thursday Facebook-Owner Meta two months to change its access rules for ad review partners, arguing that the company may be taking unfair advantage of a dominant position in online advertising.
In a statement, the competition authority said Meta must publish new access criteria for partners who want to use its analytics tools to assess whether online advertising campaigns have actually been seen by people and are not displayed in a way that could damage the brand’s reputation .
The new criteria must be transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate.
“We are reviewing the preliminary decision and reviewing all of our options,” a Meta spokesman said in an emailed statement.
Ad verification companies offer services including measuring how many views online ads get, detecting fraudulent online traffic, and making sure customer ads don’t appear on websites that harm their brand, such as B. Pornographic websites.
The French panel said Meta’s invite-only approach only allows the largest operators to access its data and could be seen as discriminatory in the company’s “visibility” and “brand safety” areas.
The case was brought by Adloox, a small, independent French ad verification company that tried unsuccessfully to gain access to Meta’s data for those services from 2016 to 2022.
Adloox complained to the Competition Authority last year, and the authority found that the barrier to entry created by Meta caused “immediate and serious” harm specifically to Adloox and to the independent ad verification sector as a whole.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
