Meta Says EU Was Like ‘Fishing Trawler’ in Antitrust Data Hunt
- Facebook owner suing EU over ‘irrelevant’ demands in probes
- EU court earlier said sensitive data requests needed a review
Meta Platforms headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Photographer: Nick Otto/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Meta Platforms Inc. accused the European Union’s antitrust authority of acting like “a fishing super trawler” by netting vast amounts of “wholly irrelevant” documents in an attempt to build a case against the U.S. tech giant.
The commission was “hoovering up the whole sea bed -- with the intention that it will later see what species of rare fish it finds within its vast nets,” Daniel Jowell, a lawyer for Meta, told a five-judge panel of the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Wednesday in a clash that turns the tables on regulators who often express concerns over data-collection practices of Meta’s Facebook social network.