Social Media’s International Reach

April 24, 2025

Privacy Plus+

Privacy, Technology and Perspective

This week, let’s draw a connection between Canada’s Online News Act and the European Union’s (EU) recent fines of Apple and Meta under its Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The Online News Act:  In 2023, Canada’s Online News Act (CONA) began to require large platforms like Meta and Google to pay Canadian news media for the news content that the large platforms share. In retaliation, Meta simply shut off sharing Canadian news altogether on Facebook and Instagram. 

 You can read more about Meta’s ban by clicking this link:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2024/09/12/how-metas-news-ban-reshaped-canadian-media/

Meta’s ban on sharing Canadian news has not stopped misinformation and disinformation from spreading across the Canadian social media landscape, including on Facebook, where “hyper-partisan and far-right groups” have disseminated misleading content, nonetheless.

You can read more about “How Meta’s News Ban Could Disrupt Canada’s Election”

in the New York Times article below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/technology/canada-election-facebook-instagram-meta.html 

EU’s DMA Fine of Meta and Apple:  This week, the European Commission (EC) announced fines of $570 million and $230 million, respectively, on Apple and Meta for violations of the DMA.  Briefly, the DMA requires large-platform providers to avoid abusing their market positions, which the EC concluded Apple and Meta have done through restricting access to rivals’ app stores (Apple) and offering ad-free subscription offerings – in effect, by requiring consumers to pay for privacy (Meta). The platforms have sixty days to reform, or the EC may go further.

You can read more about this by clicking the following link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/technology/apple-meta-eu-fines-competition-law.html

Our Thoughts

Considering Apple’s and Meta’s annual revenues, the fines assessed are low. However, the potential for attention-getting fines, measured in hurtful percentages of the giant platforms’ global revenues, is present under the DMA, just as it is under the GDPR. For their part, Apple or Meta could take unilateral action of their own to withdraw from European markets in whole or in part, as Meta did with Canada two years ago – with the potential for severe, unfortunate consequences to citizens of the EU like or worse than those that have appeared in Canada. And looming over everything is the chaos over foreign trade, complicating every calculation.

We expect (hope?) that these confrontations will settle down over time, because it is not in anyone’s interest for these countries to lose what have become valuable platforms for communication and commerce, or for these platforms to lose the resulting revenue. 

But that will depend on cool heads and calm, intelligent thought, neither of which have been lately conspicuous in corporate suites, foreign capitals, or Washington D.C.

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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.