The European Union's Court of Justice (CJEU) General Court announced on Wednesday it rejected Facebook's parent Meta Platform Inc.'s challenge of the bloc's request for certain company papers needed in an antitrust investigation of the company.
"The General Court finds that Meta Platforms Ireland has not successfully demonstrated that the request to provide documents to be identified by search terms went beyond what was necessary or that establishing a virtual data room failed to ensure that sensitive personal data was sufficiently protected," the court's ruling read.
Meta's challenge attempt came after the European Commission started an investigation into the company's decision to connect the Facebook Marketplace sales page to its social platform, according to authorities, possibly breached the rules of fair competition. According to the court papers, Meta tried to defy the bloc's demand by claiming that "applying the search terms specified in the request for information would inevitably lead to the capture of a significant number of documents [containing private information] with no relevance to the investigation."
