Meta has put on hold a change to its business terms that publishers and businesses say would have let it help itself to their websites, and the UK's competition regulator has opened a formal case anyway. The Competition and Markets Authority said on 30 October that it is investigating whether Meta's commercial terms for businesses that use its platforms break UK competition law.
The terms were due to take effect on 30 October. Meta first pushed them to 20 November after talks with the CMA, then on 28 October announced a pause while it consults industry groups, according to the regulator. Meta says its existing terms remain in place for now.
What the terms would have allowed
The updated terms authorise automated tools such as scrapers and bots to "index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl" domains, pages or URLs tied to a business account, and would have applied to all business clients without payment for the content taken, AP reports via TechXplore. Nearly every news organisation runs at least one such account on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Threads, Nieman Lab noted. After criticism, Meta removed the word "train" and limited use of the content to "advertising and business products"; legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised wording would still permit mass scraping.
The CMA said the terms could let Meta collect content from the websites of businesses and publishers and use it to build its own products, including AI features, without those businesses having a choice. It warned this could amount to an "unlawful imposition of unfair trading conditions" on thousands of UK businesses. The case was prompted by complaints from groups including the News Media Association and the Movement for an Open Web.
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- Norway: a court granted a temporary injunction suspending the terms on 28 October, pending a full assessment. The publishers' association MBL says the pause is not enough and wants Meta to respect scraping opt-outs, sign separate paid deals for AI use of journalism, and not penalise publishers who refuse.
- European Union: a Commission spokesperson said it had discussed the terms with Meta, welcomed the postponement and will ensure Meta's practices comply with EU law. German publisher groups representing more than 9,000 media brands had asked the Commission to block the terms.
- United States: the Association of American Publishers called the terms "onerous". No lawsuit has been filed there.
Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone has said the update was about pulling accurate product information from third-party shopping sites, not scraping news sites. Meta told the CMA there are no grounds for a competition investigation and that it has committed not to change its terms without consulting publishers and other stakeholders. The CMA has not found any breach; it will first decide whether Meta holds a dominant position in a UK market and then whether the terms abuse it.
The regulator is separately asking Meta about Meta One, its paid business subscription, after the Federation of Small Businesses raised concerns about posting external links on Facebook and Instagram without paying.
