Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg owned social media giant, may soon offer a subscription service to its European users on Instagram and Facebook for around $14 per month. This would allow people to use both platforms ad-free.
Meta officials have revealed this plan to privacy regulators in Ireland, digital competition regulators in Brussels, and European Union (EU) privacy regulators. Meta has recently been granted 'gatekeeper' status under the EU's new Digital Markets Act, which prohibits companies from combining personal data of users across their different services and imposes other restrictions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The European Union has been striving to impose stricter regulations on big tech to safeguard European users online and promote competition in the industry dominated by US tech giants.
Meta has informed regulators that it plans to charge users 10 euros ($10.46) per month for a Facebook or Instagram account on a desktop, and 6 euros for each additional linked account.
Meta would factor in commissions charged by Apple's and Google's app stores on in-app payments, causing the price to increase to approximately 13 euros per month on mobile devices.
The price of Meta's in-app payments on mobile devices may increase to around 13 euros per month due to commissions charged by Apple's and Google's app stores.
In the first half of 2023, Meta had approximately 258 million monthly users on Facebook and 257 million on Instagram, according to the company's own estimates.
The company was earlier in the news when its subsidiary firm WhatsApp banned a record over 74 lakh bad accounts in India in the month of August, in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021.
