Following a referral by ad tech service provider Criteo in September 2019, the French competition authority (FCA) opened an investigation into Meta’s online advertising activities.

The FCA’s preliminary assessment identified a number of concerns around ad tech firms being able to access i) Meta’s partnership programme and ii) advertising application programme interfaces (APIs) for placing personalised bids and product recommendations.

The FCA has now accepted Meta’s commitments. Meta has offered to provide ad tech firms targeting customers in France access to their partnership programme when certain levels of spending are met. It will also develop a new API for ad service providers to use their own targeting technologies (subject to certain access criteria).

Frontier Economics advised Meta during the FCA investigation.

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