Digital publishers and advertisers lobbied the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on Thursday to suspend Meta’s new commercial terms, due to take effect on October 30, arguing they give Meta an unlimited right to use publishers’ and businesses’ content for its AI services, Reuters reported.
The escalation moves the fight over Meta’s business terms from industry criticism into regulators’ in-trays. Advocacy group the Movement for an Open Web, whose members include digital advertisers and publishers, said it had complained to both the European Commission and the CMA and requested interim measures. The terms, Meta says, consolidate crawling provisions for its ads and business products — but publishers fear they convert a business account into a licence for AI training data.
The Complaint: Interim Measures Before October 30
The Movement for an Open Web alleges the terms are anti-competitive because businesses that depend on Meta’s platforms have no realistic alternative and no way to opt out. “Meta’s new terms are clearly anti-competitive. Many businesses effectively have no choice but to use Meta’s services and these conditions would force them to sign away the rights to their digital content with no means of opting out,” said Tim Cowen, the group’s co-founder. “The terms would give Meta a free hand to scrape content from nearly every website in the world, potentially using that data to power AI-powered services that would then compete with those businesses,” he told Reuters.
The group has advised publishers to delete their corporate and business accounts on Meta platforms before October 30 to keep their intellectual property out of Meta’s reach. “The terms go live in a few days time and, once they’re in force the damage will be done — you can’t unscrape that content,” Cowen said, urging the CMA to use its interim-measures powers to block the terms while a deeper investigation runs.
UK Publishers Join The Push
The News Media Association, which represents UK national and local titles, has likewise asked the CMA to secure an immediate pause, warning that local publishers would be hardest hit because they derive an outsized share of traffic from Facebook. “Meta’s bid to force publishers to allow unrestricted scraping of their websites to power its AI products is an outrageous assault on journalism,” said Theo Bamber, the association’s chief executive, calling it a “shameless land grab” and urging the regulator to use the powers Parliament gave it under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.
Meta Disagrees — And Says Crawling Has Not Changed
Meta said it disagreed with the complaint. “The crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers,” a Meta spokesperson said. “As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.” The CMA said it met with Meta on Wednesday to get more details on the new business terms, calling it “an important issue” and saying it is “engaged in urgent discussions with Meta as we consider our next steps.”
Why It Matters
The fight over Meta’s terms has become the contractual front line of the AI training-data war, and this week’s regulatory complaints show why: publishers learned on October 17 that a single sentence in a terms update can quietly convert a business account into a training-data licence, and Meta removed that sentence within days of legal experts flagging it. The remaining provisions still authorise automated access to business-linked sites, and publishers are no longer willing to take Meta’s stated practices at face value — they want regulators to suspend the terms first and investigate later. The stakes are plainest for local publishers, whose business depends on the very Meta traffic that would come with the new conditions attached. For the wider industry, the episode confirms that the terms-of-service page, not the press statement, is the document that decides who owns the training data.
Background
Meta published its updated commercial terms ahead of an October 30 effective date, consolidating crawling provisions for ads and business products. When Nieman Lab and legal experts flagged language that appeared to authorise AI training on business-linked websites, Meta deleted the AI-training sentence on October 17 while keeping the automated-access provisions. Publishers, already in litigation and negotiation with AI companies over the value of their archives, treated the removal as incomplete — and are now asking Brussels and London to stop the terms before they take effect. Meta is fighting these battles while spending record sums on AI infrastructure: its third-quarter results showed capital expenditure guidance rising to between $135 billion and $145 billion for 2026, the build-out behind its Muse models and Meta AI products.
Source: Reuters, The Media Leader
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