The EU General Court’s President suspends RFIs requiring the production of documents containing sensitive personal data until a specific virtual data room procedure is set up (Facebook)

On 29 October 2020, the President of the General Court (“GC”) issued two orders suspending the operation of requests for information (“RFIs”) issued to Facebook Ireland Ltd (“Facebook”) by the European Commission (“Commission”) concerning documents that are not related to Face- book’s commercial activities and that contain sensitive personal data, until a specific virtual data room procedure is put in place to control access to these documents (Face- book Ireland v. Commission, Joined Cases T-451/20 R and T-452/20 R). The RFIs were addressed to Facebook in connection with two ongoing antitrust investigations, i.e., Case AT.40684 – Facebook Marketplace and Case AT.40628 – Facebook data-related practices). Factual background In November 2019, the Commission issued an RFI whereby it