Publishing groups have called on EU and UK regulators to urgently block new Meta Platforms business terms from taking effect, arguing the terms would allow Meta to copy their content en masse for use in AI training.

The Movement for an Open Web, whose members include advertisers and publishers, said on 22 October that it had complained to the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority and requested interim measures.

Tim Cowen, co-founder of the group, said the terms, which take effect on 30 October, would “force (businesses) to sign away the rights to their digital content with no means of opting out“.

Content scraping

He added: “The terms would give Meta a free hand to scrape content from nearly every website in the world, potentially using that data to power AI-powered services that would then compete with those businesses.”

The European Publishers Council, Germany’s Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers Association (BDZV) and the Association of the Free Press have all issued similar complaints in recent days.

The CMA said it met with Meta on 21 October following the earlier complaints to get more details on the terms, adding that the issues raised were “important” and that it was in discussions with Meta.

The European Commission said it had received and was assessing a complaint.

Earlier this month Nieman Lab, a journalism research unit at Harvard University, reported the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.

On Friday, following earlier complaints, Meta removed the word “train” and issued verbal assurances to organisations that its web crawling policies had not changed.

The EPC letter acknowledged these assurances, but said the terms themselves don’t guarantee companies’ content won’t be used to train AI.

“This is unscrupulous theft,” said the BDZV in its statement.