European publishers ask Brussels to stop Meta's crawling terms.
The European Publishers Council has written to the European Commission a second time about Meta's new business terms. It wants the website-crawling clause examined under EU competition law and held back before it takes effect on 20 November.
The Brussels trade body for news publishers published its statement on 23 October, the same day Meta pushed the start date of its revised Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms from 30 October to 20 November. Its executive director, Angela Mills Wade, promoted it on LinkedIn on 24 October. The council says Meta's one concession, removing the word "train" from the clause, changes little: the text still lets Meta's crawlers access, index, cache, analyse and collect content from any domain linked to a business's products, and it does not expressly rule out fine-tuning, grounding or AI-generated answers and summaries.
Two other points sit at the centre of the complaint. Businesses accept the terms simply by carrying on using Meta's products, with no way to refuse the extra permissions and stay on the platforms. And the council says robots.txt, which Meta has pointed to as the control site owners already have, is no substitute for written limits in a contract. It wants the Commission to look at the terms under the Digital Markets Act and, if interim measures can't be adopted in time, to get Meta to postpone the disputed provisions.
This is an advocacy position, not a ruling. The council hasn't published the letter itself, and its statement doesn't say whether the Commission has replied. Interim measures normally need formal proceedings and a first finding of an infringement, which is a lot to do in under four weeks. In the US, the News/Media Alliance has asked Meta to respond publicly by 26 October.
The terms apply worldwide, so Gulf brands, retailers and publishers running Pages, catalogues or ads on Facebook and Instagram are covered by the same clause. Any business with editorial, research or customer content on its site should read the 20 November text now rather than after it applies.
Why it matters
Every advertiser on Facebook and Instagram accepts Meta's crawling clause by default on 20 November; European publishers are now pressing regulators to stop it first.
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