The Bundeskartellamt has informed Facebook of its preliminary legal assessment in the abuse of dominance proceeding which the Authority is conducting against the company.
Based on the current stage of the proceedings, the Authority assumes that Facebook is dominant on the German market for social networks. The Authority holds the view that Facebook is abusing this dominant position by making the use of its social network conditional on its being allowed to limitlessly amass every kind of data generated by using third-party websites and merge it with the user's Facebook account. These third-party sites include firstly services owned by Facebook such as WhatsApp or Instagram, and secondly websites and apps of other operators with embedded Facebook APIs.
The full text of the Bundeskartellamt’s press release is available here.