Publishers, advertisers call EU, UK antitrust regulators to suspend Meta's new commercial terms

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Digital advertisers and publishers lobbied on Thursday for EU and UK regulators to suspend Meta Platforms' new commercial terms due to come into effect on October 30, alleging that these would give Meta an unlimited right to use their content for its AI services.

Advocacy group the Movement for an Open Web, whose members include digital advertisers and publishers, said it had complained to the European Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority and requested interim measures.

Publishers worldwide are stepping up their fight with AI companies that use their content without permission to train large language models, underscoring the clash between copyright owners and those citing fair use arguments.

"Meta's new terms are clearly anti-competitive. Many businesses effectively have no choice but to use Meta's services and these conditions would force them to sign away the rights to their digital content with no means of opting out," Tim Cowen, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, said.

"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," he said.

Meta said it disagreed with the complaint.

"The crawling terms we consolidated 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," a Meta spokesperson said.

"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."

The CMA said it met with Meta on Wednesday to get more details on its new business terms.

"This is an important issue and we recognise the concerns that have been raised by businesses in the UK. We are engaged in urgent discussions with Meta as we consider our next steps," a CMA spokesperson said.

The European Commission said it has received a complaint which it would assess in line with its usual procedure and that it was committed to ensuring that Meta's practices comply with EU laws. 

Companies requesting interim measures have to show that they will suffer serious and irreparable damage from the alleged anti-competitive practices.

The criticism by the Movement for an Open Web followed similar complaints aired by the European Publishers Council (EPC) last week and Germany's Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers Association (BDZV) and the Association of the Free Press (MVFP) earlier this week.    

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Susan Fenton)