EU court urged to reject Meta appeal
An adviser to the EU’s highest court has said that it should reject two appeals by Meta Platforms Ireland against judgments made by the lower General Court.
In 2023, the General Court had dismissed the appeals by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, against a European Commission request to provide it with internal documents.
The requests for information were made in the context of an investigation into abuse of a dominant position, relating in particular to the use of data (Facebook Data) and to the Facebook Marketplace service.
Virtual data room
The disputes stemmed from two commission decisions in 2020 to ask for internal documents held by certain senior Meta staff covering a number of years.
After interlocutory proceedings, the commission adopted amending decisions incorporating a virtual-data-room procedure intended to regulate access to certain documents containing sensitive personal data.
The lower court had found that the requests for information were sufficiently reasoned, necessary, and proportionate, and that they complied with the right to privacy and the principle of good administration.
Commission’s ‘broad powers’
In an opinion published today (26 February), Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said that the higher Court of Justice should dismiss both Meta appeals and uphold the General Court’s judgment.
He found that the General Court did not err in law in assessing the necessity of the information requested or in examining the safeguards for its provision.
Rantos pointed out that, under EU competition rules, the commission had broad powers of investigation that enable it to request all necessary information in order to carry out its tasks.
“The obligation to state reasons requires the commission to indicate the subject matter of its investigation and the suspected infringement it intends to investigate, without having to make an exhaustive legal assessment or demonstrate, at that stage, the individual relevance of each document requested,” the advocate general stated.