The Turkish Competition Authority ("TCA"), announced on its website on 18.03.2024 that an interim injunction was decided in the investigation initiated against Meta Platforms, Inc ("Meta") on suspicion of abusing its dominant position by tying Threads and Instagram applications.
Within the scope of the investigation initiated by the TCA, it has been determined that;
Meta has been active in the market for long years, it owns comprehensive and detailed data,
Meta has large and diverse user base, which makes it attractive for advertisers,
This enables Meta to spare more resources to develop its services, complicates competitors’ access to advertisers and thus financial resources; within this framework Meta’s practices in the market constitute a barrier to entry.
Moreover, Meta operates as an ecosystem with its core services and related services, which enables Meta to transfer the power and accumulation obtained from each service to another service and increases its market power
and it has been concluded that Meta’s combination of the data of the users who created Threads profiles based on their Instagram accounts without taking consent will lead to irreparable harms until the finalization of the investigation.
As it is known, as a result of another investigation into Meta recently decided by the Turkish Competition Board, it was determined that Meta, by combining the data collected from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services, made it difficult for its competitors operating in the social networking services and online display advertising markets and created a barrier to entry into the market. In this context, certain obligations were imposed on the undertaking regarding data combining practices. Similarly, at the beginning of the relevant investigation, it was decided to impose interim measures on Meta due to its data aggregation practices. Accordingly, Meta was imposed an administrative fine of 4,796,152.96 Turkish Liras over its gross revenues for the year 2022 for each day starting from 2 December 2023 until the compliance measure to be proposed by Meta is entered into the records of the Authority, on the grounds that Meta did not comply with the obligations imposed by this investigation.
As a result, it has been observed that the TCA continues to consider data combining practices as one of the important competition problems in digital markets and that there is a high likelihood of irreparable consequences in case of late intervention to this competition problem. The TCA has once again resorted to one of the most important intervention tools granted to it, namely the power to issue interim injunctions.