Hello, welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki, Mlex's managing editor for Australasia,

coming to you from our offices at the heart of Melbourne's central business district.

Now, we're all familiar with Facebook. The social media platform is continuing to attract

regulatory scrutiny as competition watchdogs grapple with just how much market power it has.

It's something that's grabbing regulators' attention throughout the world. In fact, just

recently, the Australian Competition Watchdog, the Australian Competition Consumer Commission,

announced a probe into the power of platforms such as Facebook and Google, and we covered

that announcement in some detail at the time. But in Germany, the Facebook story faces an additional layer of complexity.

Regulators there are firstly concerned that the social platform may be in breach of German

data protection rules because of the data it collects from other social networking sites.

But more importantly for us, the regulators are also concerned that

Facebook might be abusing its market power by merging this data with information obtained from

users' Facebook accounts. It's a big call based on some complicated legal considerations, and something

like this demands the superior analytical skills of

Matthew Newman, Emlex's senior correspondent, who covers mergers, antitrust, and cartel

investigations from our Brussels Bureau. Hello, Matthew. Hello, James. Glad to be here.

Now, Matthew, walk me through the issues. What are the German Competition Authority's

charges against Facebook? You're absolutely right that this is an unusual and complex case. It's the

first one we've seen, and it's the first one for Europe. Facebook is facing the charge that they

are using exploitative business terms.

So that's the technical competition term for the abuse.

Essentially what it means is that Facebook has so much market power,

...