The UK’s competition watchdog is taking Meta’s plan to implement sweeping new rights for AI access to publisher content via new terms and conditions “very seriously”, its CEO told Parliament.
It emerged at the end of last week that Meta has updated its terms and conditions to give itself sweeping rights to scrape content from any publisher or other website owner with a business account on Facebook or Instagram and reuse it – even if the content has not been published on a Meta platform.
The new terms are due to come into effect in just over a week, on Friday 30 October.
Competition and Markets Authority executive director of digital markets Will Hayter has written a letter to Meta and had a meeting with the platform set up for today (Wednesday).
But the CMA is unable to take formal action stopping Meta from making the changes because it has not yet designated the tech giant with strategic market status under the Digital Markets Act.
Asked about the change in terms by Conservative peer Veronica Wadley, Baroness Fleet, during a Communications and Digital Committee hearing on Tuesday afternoon, Hayter said: “We’ve been talking to publishers and hearing their concerns, both the public ones and the more private versions…
“We’re talking to Meta about it. We wrote them a letter yesterday to ask them for information on it, and I’m actually talking to them tomorrow to make sure we’ve understood what’s going on, and then we’ll work out what to do next.”
Baroness Fleet, who is a former Evening Standard editor and deputy editor of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, warned that the changes would affect “almost every UK news publisher, and it is clearly uncompetitive leverage of Meta’s strategic market position”.
Hayter responded: “I hear that characterisation. That’s very much the complaint that’s being made from the publisher side.”
CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell added: “We heard of this last week. We engaged directly with Meta. I’ve written to them. Will has a meeting with them tomorrow.
“We share at face value the concerns. We need to understand it better, and we will then think about – this really goes a little bit to the point about informal as well as formal – what steps we can take, both through informal engagement, formal engagement.
“We obviously don’t have a live designation in relation to Meta. There is the option also of using our competition enforcement powers. So we are very alive to the potential impact that this could have for UK businesses, and it is something that we will take very seriously.”
Cardell added that they would “consider urgently” once the CMA understood Meta’s position following Hayter’s meeting.
Press Gazette has asked the CMA for any subsequent updates.
Jason Kint, chief executive of US publisher trade body Digital Content Next, said he was “impressed that at least the UK is actually moving on this outrageous move by Meta”.
The relevant section in the new Meta terms and conditions states that by using its platforms:
“You authorise us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve or crawl the domains, web pages or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.”
Meta has since removed the word “train” but US media lawyer Matt Topic told Nieman Lab: “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’”
Kint added that the correction was a “farce. It removed ‘train’ but left AI training on the table, promised to honour robots.txt without putting it in its terms, and still claims sweeping rights to scrape websites simply because a random user shares a link.
“Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”
A Meta spokesperson has said the crawling terms “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.
“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.”
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