Meta postpones new commercial terms to address concerns over content rights

Meta Platforms META-Q will delay the implementation of updated commercial terms, so it can address concerns from publishers and digital advertisers, the U.S. tech company said on Friday, in a decision that could stave off potential regulatory action.

EU and U.K. antitrust authorities have received complaints about the new commercial terms, which publishers and digital advertisers said would give Meta an unlimited right to use their content for its AI services. Meta has rejected the claims.

“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to 20 November to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not,” a Meta spokesperson said in an e-mail.

The new commercial terms had previously been set to take effect on Oct 30.

Meta will explain how it uses web crawlers and make clear that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt – a plain text file that communicates instructions to web crawlers and AI bots – to signal preferences, the spokesperson said.

News publishers worry about how Meta might use their content under new terms

The European Commission, which serves as the EU’s antitrust watchdog, said it welcomed the delay, adding that it had sent requests for information to companies that have not yet published summaries about the data used to train their AI models.

The European Publishers Council, however, which together with other groups wants regulators to suspend Meta’s new commercial terms while they investigate the issue, reiterated its criticism.

It pointed to what it said was a lack of clear contractual safeguards against unrelated exploitation of publishers’ content.

“Maintaining a business page or advertising a subscription should not confer general rights over a publisher’s website and archive,” the council’s executive director Angela Mills Wade said.

“Uses beyond those necessary to provide the specific service requested should require separate, express authorization from the relevant rightsholder,” she added.

Publishers worldwide are ramping up their fight with AI companies that use their content without permission to train large language models, underscoring the clash between copyright owners and those citing fair-use arguments.