Court adviser signals uphill climb for Meta in EU antitrust data fight

(CN) — Meta’s attempt to slam the brakes on Brussels’ sweeping antitrust data demands hit a wall Thursday, as an adviser to the European Union’s highest court signaled the company is unlikely to win tighter limits on how regulators comb through its internal records.

In an opinion issued to the Court of Justice of the European Union, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos urged judges to dismiss Meta’s appeals of two European Commission orders requiring troves of internal emails and messages identified through keyword searches. If the court follows that advice, the commission will retain broad discretion to gather digital evidence in competition cases.

Under EU rules, the commission can require companies to provide whatever information it considers necessary to determine whether competition laws have been breached. Rantos stressed that this is no narrow power. The commission’s authority is broad, he said, and it is “for the commission to decide whether a particular item of information is necessary to enable it to bring to light an infringement of the EU competition rules.”

Meta argued that the search terms were so expansive they swept up large amounts of irrelevant and personal material. Rantos disagreed. Volume alone does not invalidate a request, he said. “The fact that some, or even most, of the documents captured may prove to be irrelevant to the investigation is not sufficient, as such, to make a finding that the search terms in question have no correlation with the infringement suspected by the commission.”

The key question, he explained, is whether regulators could reasonably believe at the time that the requested material might help establish a breach. Legality turns on that forward-looking assessment, not on how many documents later prove useful.

The appeals arise from investigations the commission opened in 2020 into Facebook Marketplace and Meta’s use of data. Regulators suspected the company may have leveraged its dominance in social networking to favor its own classifieds service and combine data across platforms in ways that could sideline rivals. To pursue those concerns, officials ordered years of internal communications from senior staff using sets of keyword searches.

Meta challenged the orders before the General Court, arguing they were disproportionate and intrusive. The lower court rejected those claims in 2023. Meta has now asked the EU’s highest court to tighten the standard and require more narrowly tailored searches in future investigations.

For Maciej Bernatt, a professor of European economic law at the University of Warsaw, the opinion is measured rather than seismic. He called it “a useful clarification” for a digital era in which key evidence sits in electronic archives and large-scale searches may be necessary to keep investigations effective.

Still, he said the limits remain fuzzy. Courts need clearer guidance on when an information request becomes excessive, particularly since the same demand can weigh very differently on a small firm than on a global platform. He also pointed to the growing role of fundamental rights and data protection rules in antitrust probes, predicting more litigation over how personal data is handled once collected.

Kristina Irion, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, placed the emphasis elsewhere. She described the dispute as “a procedural skirmish about the powers of investigation of the European commission,” rather than a broader clash over big tech. In her reading, the advocate general largely reaffirms established case law giving the commission discretion to choose how it gathers evidence, especially when investigations hinge on digital records.

She said the paired search terms already functioned as a limiting device, not an unchecked sweep. The fact that some retrieved documents contain personal data does not, in her view, undermine the legality of the request, given the commission’s professional secrecy obligations. At the same time, she noted that “Meta is protecting users’ data privacy best against regulators,” underscoring that the company’s privacy concerns are not entirely misplaced.

The dispute comes amid a broader standoff between Meta and Brussels. In recent years, the commission has pursued the company in antitrust investigations and, separately, labeled it a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s flagship effort to rein in the dominance of major online platforms. Meta has pushed back on several fronts, arguing that regulators are stretching their authority in the name of tightening oversight of big tech.

Thibault Schrepel, an associate professor of law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said the opinion reflects a structural shift in how antitrust works. In digital markets, evidence is scattered across vast datasets, making broad electronic searches a practical necessity rather than bureaucratic excess.

Still, he warned that enforcement needs clearer guardrails. “The legal regime that is currently taking shape must remain flexible,” he said, calling for stronger design standards and safeguards around how large-scale data is collected and reviewed. The opinion tackles whether authorities can gather information, he noted, but says much less about how that data is processed once in their hands, a question that will only grow more urgent as analytics and AI tools become central to competition probes.

A spokesperson for the European Commission declined to comment, saying the institution does not respond to advocate general opinions. Meta did not reply to a request for comment.

The court is not bound by the advocate general’s opinion, though it frequently aligns with such advice. A final judgment is expected in the coming months and will determine whether the commission’s approach to large-scale digital evidence gathering stands as is or must be recalibrated.

Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.