European users of Facebook and Instagram could be faced with a choice of seeing more ads in their feeds or paying a fee to avoid them altogether.
Meta has submitted a proposal to privacy officials in Ireland, Brussels and other EU states that would charge users nearly $14 per month to use Instagram on their phones without ads or $17 per month to use Facebook and Instagram ad-free on desktop devices.
Those fees would be an alternative for users who don’t agree to let Meta use their digital activity to target ads.
Meta hopes to roll out the charges in the coming months, according to The Wall Street Journal. The action is meant to circumnavigate EU rules that prevent the company from personalizing advertising in people’s feeds without their consent. (Personalized ads are Meta’s chief form of revenue.) Meta had previously threatened to pull the services from the EU because of the data privacy rules.
U.S. users are not expected to be affected by the proposal. That said, Meta has been more welcoming to the idea of a paid service in the past year.
In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta Verified, a subscription service for Facebook and Instagram users. Content creators willing to pay monthly fees of $11.99 on the web, or $14.99 per month on mobile, can be rewarded with increased reach and visibility. That service initially launched in Australia and New Zealand.
While Meta has proposed the fees, the company must first get the blessing of regulators before it implements those. So far, officials have not ruled on whether the plan complies with EU laws. Regulations in that part of the world demand that users who decline to give consent for certain data are still able to access a service.
Meta estimates it has 258 million monthly Facebook users and 257 million Instagram users for the first half of the year in the EU.
