The association, which represents 83 outlets, including leading newspapers such as El País, El Mundo and La Vanguardia, is seeking 550 million euros in compensation for lost earnings.
The Spanish Media Association filed a lawsuit in the Madrid commercial court, claiming that Meta’s personalized advertising strategy based on user data does not comply with EU regulations.
AMI argues that this gives Meta, which owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, an unfair advantage in the advertising market.
The allegation dates back to May 2018, when new EU data protection rules were introduced requiring companies to ask visitors to their sites for permission to process their data.
EMPHASIS ON ‘ADVERTISING SALES’
AMI says Meta does not enforce this rule on its platforms, allowing it to collect personal data, which means that “100 percent of the tech giant’s revenues from targeted ad sales are illegitimately obtained.”
In May, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which regulates across the EU, fined Meta €1.2 billion for transferring the personal data of European Facebook users from the EU to the US.
In response to this sanction, Meta said:
“At a time when the internet is cracking under the pressure of authoritarian regimes, like-minded democracies must work together to promote and defend the idea of an open internet. Meta has done more than the US to comply with European rules”
ANOTHER BLOW TO META
In July, Meta suffered another blow when the European Court of Justice upheld a ruling by German regulators that prevented the company from collecting data on its platforms without explicit consent from users.
The case in Spain dates back to the middle of this year, since Meta introduced a new subscription service for EU Facebook users that it believes prevents data protection breaches. A 2021 report by Spain’s CNMC stock market regulator estimates that Facebook and Google control a 70 percent share of Spain’s annual online advertising market, worth a total of €3.45 billion in 2019.
“Given that this is a market that has emerged in the last 20 years and where there are not enough regulatory boundaries, these figures are truly remarkable,” CNMC said.
AMI’s demand of 550 million euros is based both on Meta’s increased revenue from advertising over the five-year period in question and on an estimate of how much Spanish media would have earned without the company’s allegedly illegal advertising practices.
The association warned that Meta’s practices “jeopardize the survival of Spanish media, which is fundamental to the quality of a country’s democracy”. It also noted that the media is the second most digitized sector in Spain after the technology sector.
