The story. The European Commission’s April 2025 finding that Meta’s original “pay-or-consent” model breached the Digital Markets Act — a €200 million fine, plus an order to bring a compliant alternative to market within 60 days — did not close the file. The Commission has spent the months since reviewing whether Meta’s revised “less personalized ads” tier actually satisfies the DMA’s consent-must-be-free requirement, and its preliminary read, relayed to Meta this quarter, is that the revised model still conditions access to Facebook and Instagram on accepting either payment or broad ad personalization in a way that doesn’t meet the bar — setting up a second non-compliance decision, this time with daily periodic penalty payments attached rather than a one-time fine.
01What happened
- The 2025 decision is not the end state. The Commission’s original €200 million fine was explicitly a first-non-compliance-period penalty, calculated on Meta’s relevant EU turnover for the period the original pay-or-consent model ran; the DMA’s structure lets the Commission reopen enforcement on the same conduct if a company’s remedy doesn’t fix the underlying problem.
- The statutory ceiling dwarfs the 2025 number. The DMA caps a non-compliance fine at 10% of a gatekeeper’s total worldwide annual turnover for a first finding, doubling to 20% for a repeat infringement — room the Commission has deliberately left itself for a much larger second finding on the same conduct.
- The specific complaint has narrowed to genuine freeness of consent. Regulators’ preliminary view is that a “less personalized ads” tier still priced meaningfully close to the full-ads-free subscription doesn’t give users a genuinely free choice, since the practical alternative to consenting is paying — the same structural objection the original decision made, applied to Meta’s fix.
- Periodic penalty payments are the mechanism getting attention, not a fresh flat fine. Unlike the 2025 decision, a second non-compliance finding under the DMA can carry daily penalties accruing until the Commission is satisfied the conduct has actually stopped — a materially different incentive than a one-time cost Meta can treat as a line item.
- Meta’s public position is that its revised model already complies, arguing the less-personalized tier is a genuine third option distinct from the original binary; the dispute is over whether that’s true in practice, not over whether the DMA applies.
02What publishers should do about it
03The bottom line
The Commission’s original Meta fine looked, on paper, like the kind of one-time cost a platform absorbs and moves past — the daily-penalty mechanism now in play is designed specifically so that doesn’t happen twice. Publishers with meaningful Meta-referred audience or ad revenue should treat this as a live compliance track, not a closed 2025 story, because the remedy Meta is defending right now is the one that determines how EU users reach Meta’s platforms — and how much of that reach a publisher can keep counting on — for the next enforcement cycle.
04Offer tie-in
Publishers whose traffic and revenue planning leans on any single platform’s consent architecture are exactly who APH’s diversified demand strategy work is built for — spreading yield across direct, programmatic and CTV channels so a single regulator’s ruling on a single platform isn’t a publisher’s whole revenue plan.