The Spanish press trial against the technological giant target for unfair competition has been this Thursday seen for sentence after a frontal clash between the parties during the second and definitive session of the process. The resolution that Judge Teodoro Ladrón Roda, head of the Commercial Court number 15 of Madrid, will issue in the next 20 business days will decide if a claim for 551 million euros thrives. And it will have implications for the rest of the open causes against the company of Mark Zuckerberg by the media, both from Spain and other countries of the European Union. The reason is that the more than 80 headwaters grouped in the demand through the Association of Information Media (AMI) consider that goal has incurred unfair competition by using data from its users for the sale of personalized advertising against European legislation. This case finds parallelism in France, where more than fifty media sued the company of Mark Zuckerberg last spring under the same accusation.
The frontal clash between the parties has been evident at the end of this Thursday’s session, which has lasted more than seven hours. It has been during the presentation of the conclusions when the demanding lawyer, Nicolás González-Cuéllar, has raised his voice to make a defense of the viability of the media. “We need plural media, not great oligarch platforms, which can compete in the market so that citizens can access information and freedom of expression.” Before several executives of the matrix of applications such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, present in the room and arrived from the company’s headquarters in Ireland, the demanding lawyer has affirmed that Meta “is presented as a technological champion, but is a copy champion and the regulatory breach on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The legal representative of the media has also questioned the success of the Meta business model, which has been described during the interventions of the experts and of “Engage” or “hook” of users to interact on their platforms. “The media have been harmed and target for many years,” González-Cuéllar said before ensuring that this “hook” to the finish lines comes from the use of the personal data of his followers. And he added: “Meta bases his model on the hitch, and that does not have to be good, there is also hook to addictive substances. Also smugglers go with ships faster than the Civil Guard.”
Such comparison caused the indignation on the face of the Meta representative lawyer in this case, Javier de Carvajal Cebrián, who was about to explode in a laugh when his opponent later cited an affirmation of the Government of Spain that he considered in 2023 to the media “in the avant -garde of modernity”. Seeing the mocking gesture of the Meta lawyer, the legal representative of the media hired: “He puts that face because he will not have read many newspapers in life. They will not give us lessons of modernity and technology.” During his subsequent speech, Meta’s lawyer responded to the attack on the business model based on the “hitch” of his represented. “Hook is not a vice. It is creating a committed audience. Having more users gives rise to a more attractive platform. And if it is for users it will also be for advertisers.”
The session has focused on the unemployed profit that the plaintiff headwaters consider having stopped entering the “unfair competition” of Meta, selling personalized advertising using data from its users contravening European legislation. His amount, as the experts contributed by the defense of the media have secured, has been carried out by estimation in the absence of concrete data of the technological giant business. After long interventions of the experts of both parties, which have included a career among them, the demanding lawyer has justified that estimated calculation of not having received specific information about it. In addition, said lawyer recalled that in the session of the previous day he interrogated witnesses contributed by Meta and none clarified, nor how much invoice the company in Spain, nor what quota of the advertising market binds or how many users are registered on their platforms. And he concluded that the estimate of 551 million euros “falls short, because otherwise the goal would have contributed the data.”
The lawyer of the defendant has argued that the calculated loss of lossing is based on “estimates that have not been proven.” In this regard, he said that absent data “could have been requested in preliminaries and in the previous audience.” In short, the Meta lawyer asks to dismiss the demand for absence of legal breach, of causal and improper link quantification of damages, in addition to the imposition of costs to the plaintiffs and the declaration of recklessness for abuse of law. Also, he has considered his opponent’s appreciations about the media as “an apology to save the Spanish press.” And he has settled: “More Spanish than me, I assure you no.”
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