Meta offered EU users only a binary 'consent or pay' choice — €200M DMA fine

On 23 April 2025 the European Commission fined Meta €200 million for breaching the Digital Markets Act with its 'Consent or Pay' advertising model. Under the DMA, a gatekeeper must seek users' consent to combine their personal data across services, and users who refuse must still get a less-personalised but equivalent alternative.

In November 2023 Meta introduced a binary choice for EU users of Facebook and Instagram: consent to the combination of their personal data for personalised advertising, or pay a monthly subscription for an ad-free service. There was no third, less-personalised but free option.

The Commission found the model did not give users the specific choice the DMA required — to opt for a service that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the personalised-ads service. It also found the model did not let users freely exercise their right to consent to data combination.

The €200 million fine was the Commission's first-ever non-compliance penalty under the DMA, handed out on the same day Apple was fined €500 million under the same regulation. Meta was ordered to comply with the DMA's consent obligations.

The €200M fine punished pricing refusal as a subscription fee; the DMA demands a free, less-personalized alternative, not a binary pay-or-consent choice.

A binary 'consent or pay' choice is not a choice about data at all — it prices refusal as a subscription fee, which is why it fails a law that demands a no-data alternative.

When the only options are 'give us your data for free' or 'pay us money', the free path is the one most users take, so the law's consent requirement is hollowed out.

Being the first DMA fine, the sum was set to make the new regime credible enough that gatekeepers design for compliance rather than pay the penalty later.

A paywall forcing users to choose between their data and their money fails data-protection law's core demand: a real, free, less-data alternative — pricing refusal is not offering consent.

Meta continued to defend the model in court and adjusted its roll-out in some EU markets while the appeal proceeded. The decision marked the DMA's first non-compliance fine and set a precedent that the Commission was willing to enforce the new regime's consent rules against a gatekeeper.