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The U.K. competition and consumer protection authority sent a formal letter to Meta to discuss its new commercial terms of service.
On Tuesday, Will Hayter, the executive director for digital markets at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), shared the update during a session of the communications and digital committee of British Parliament, after a member of the House of Lords pressed him about Meta’s new terms. Hayter said he scheduled a meeting with the tech giant today to seek clarity on the new terms, though the CMA declined to provide any further details
Last week, Nieman Lab broke the news that the terms would permit mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. The new terms are slated to take effect on October 30, and there is currently no option to opt out. Virtually every news organization owns at least one Meta business account.
“Are you going to pause the deadline? I mean, [it’s in] a week,” Veronica Wadley, Baroness Fleet and a former editor of the Evening Standard, said during the session of Parliament. “You know this includes almost every U.K. news publisher and it is clearly uncompetitive leverage of Meta’s strategic market position.”
In the same session, Sarah Cardell, the CEO of CMA, said the authority had limited intervention options because it has not formally designated Meta as an “entrenched market power” (something it has done in the past for Google and Apple). Cardell said other competition enforcement actions are a possibility, but the CMA is “urgently” seeking more information from Meta before making any judgment.
Over the weekend, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.” But legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised terms would still permit mass scraping.
A Meta spokesperson said on Saturday 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.”
Meta has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service.
“Does Meta think we can’t read?” Theo Bamber, chief executive of the U.K.’s News Media Association, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “We know you’ve taken the word ‘train’ out but changing it to ‘develop’ isn’t fooling anyone.”
News publisher associations across Europe have called on regulators to intervene before the terms take effect next week.
On Tuesday, two major German publisher associations called on the European Commission to prohibit the new terms from going into effect until a complete review had been conducted. Together, the German Association of Free Press and the Federal Association of Digital Publishers represent more than 9,000 media brands across Europe.
“Meta intends to automatically capture, copy, and store the complete websites and archives of publishers and analyze them for its own automated and non-automated commercial products,” reads a joint statement from the associations. “This makes access to Meta’s platforms contingent on the free surrender of the entire digital publishing product. This is blatant theft.”
The statement alleges that Meta’s new terms could be in violation of the E.U. Digital Markets Act, which was passed in 2022 to curb the dominance of big tech companies and create fairer competition across the region. The publishers cited a specific clause that guarantees “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users.”
The uproar from European publishers echoes similar opposition to the new terms from major U.S. publisher associations. Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, has been vocal about his skepticism of the new terms since Nieman Lab’s story broke last week.
“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction to its new commercial terms is a farce,” he wrote in a statement published on Tuesday. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”
