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The AMI claims that Meta has abused its dominant position in the advertising market.
A year after a group representing 83 Spanish media outlets filed a lawsuit against Meta, a Madrid court has set the date for the tech giant to face trial in the country. The hearings will be held on 1 and 2 October next year, the 15th Madrid commercial court said in a statement.
The Association of Information Media (AMI) represents media outlets across Spain. In its €550m lawsuit filed in December 2023, the group claimed that Meta breached EU data protection rules, conducting “systematic and massive non-compliance” between May 2018 and July 2023.
The lawsuit alleged that the Facebook and Instagram owner ignored regulations that state EU citizens must consent to the use of their data for advertising profiling. It claimed that Meta obtained all of its targeted advertising revenue in the EU in an illegitimate way.
The group also claimed that Meta developed a dominant position in the advertising market by disregarding EU regulation, adding that these actions created unfair competition, jeopardising the survival of media in the country by preventing them from receiving fair monetisation.
Moreover, in a separate lawsuit last month, a group of Spanish TV and radio broadcasters’ associations sued Meta for €160m, making the same claims.
Spanish TV and radio broadcasters’ associations, the Unión de Televisiones Comerciales en Abierto and the Spanish Association of Commercial Radio alleged in their lawsuit that “massive non-compliance” with GDPR has allowed Meta to increase its market share in the online advertising market.
However, similar attempts have backfired in countries such as Canada and Australia where Meta has blocked or threatened to block news content from Facebook in response to being required to pay news publishers.
The issue between Australia and Facebook goes back to 2021, when the platform blocked content from Australian news media from appearing on its platform just ahead of a new code requiring companies to pay publishers being voted into law.
While in Canada, Meta choose to block news from its platforms rather than pay publishers after the country brought in the Online News Act, which aims to increase fairness in the digital news marketplace, the government said. Google, meanwhile, agreed to pay millions for news in Canada.
A recent report found that Canadian news publishers and broadcasters faced declines in online traffic, engagement and revenue in the year since Meta’s ban was implemented.
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