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Democratic senator Adam Schiff of California is urging Meta not to implement its forthcoming commercial terms on November 20, his office announced Tuesday.
In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Schiff called on the company to respond by Monday, November 2 with the specific steps it will take to address user concerns.
“Forcing publishers to choose between surrendering their off-platform IP or forfeiting a primary channel of public communication is a gross abuse of Meta’s power as a powerful platform with critical access to consumers,” Schiff wrote. “Meta must not nullify federal IP protections and fair market competition through the unilateral insertion of fine print into terms of service contracts.”
Specifically, Schiff told Meta that it should “provide explicit guarantees that external technical boundaries like paywalls and robots.txt protocols will be fully respected.”
“Meta’s verbal assurances that it will not supersede robots.txt files, which are voluntary server flags, do not appear to constitute enforceable legal protections, Schiff said. “Without the insertion of specific language codifying Meta’s policy to respect robots.txt signals into the latest contractual terms, users lack any reliable means by which to protect their content.”
Schiff’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Schiff is the latest elected official in the United States to raise concerns about Meta’s commercial terms, which have now become a bipartisan concern. On Friday, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said that the terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts.”
Blackburn, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, called on the company to withdraw the terms.
The terms were previously set to take effect on October 30. With no way to opt out, the news of the terms set off an outcry from news publishers, politicians, and press associations on both sides of the Atlantic. Meta then delayed the effective date of its new terms of service for business accounts to November 20. On Tuesday, a coalition of Norwegian news publishers sued Meta over the terms, and are asking the Oslo District Court to block the terms from going into effect until the court has determined the legality of the terms. The legal action, led by the Norwegian Media Companies Association, is the first lawsuit in the world raised against Meta over its commercial terms.
Nieman Lab first reported on the terms on October 15. They would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Virtually every news organization has at least one business account. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.”
“We are extending the effective date of our updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms to November 20 to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what’s changing and what’s not — including how Meta uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners will still be able to use robots.txt to signal preferences,” a Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab in a statement Friday.
A Meta spokesperson said on October 17 that the company revised the language because it “wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”
As of October 27, Meta has made no other changes to the terms aside from the implementation date. No versions of the terms include language about respecting robots.txt preferences.
Read the full letter here.
