European Publishers Ask Brussels to Stop Meta's Terms Before November 20

The European Publishers Council has written a second letter to the European Commission regarding Meta's updated commercial and self-serve ad terms, asking for them to be examined under the Digital Markets Act and EU competition law. If interim measures cannot be taken before November 20, 2026, the Council asks the Commission to obtain an immediate commitment from Meta to defer the disputed provisions. The Council published its statement on October 23, the same day Meta moved the effective date of the terms from October 30 to November 20. The Council described the amendments as having "changed little in substance."

Meta's primary change was deleting the explicit reference to the word "training" from the web crawling clause and tying the clause to stated purposes relating to ads, business products, and the safety and security of Meta's products. However, the Council does not see this as a solution, stating that removing a single word does not create an explicit exclusion for AI training, fine-tuning, web grounding, or generating and displaying answers and summaries. It adds that the permission remains broad, encompassing automated access, indexing, caching, analyzing, harvesting, retrieving, generating test credentials, and periodically collecting updates.

The statement highlights the absence of an explicit opt-out mechanism. A company's continued use of Meta products after notice implies consent to the update, with the only alternative offered being to cease all commercial use of Meta products, and there is no way to accept the terms for a Facebook page while rejecting them for a website at the same time. The Council wants uses beyond the requested service to require separate, explicit authorization from the rights holder, and for publishers to retain the right to negotiate scope, value, and pricing, or to refuse without losing access to services.

Meta says site owners can control access via the robots.txt file, but the Council rejects this as a substitute for clear contractual language. It states that technical controls do not compensate for enforceable contractual limits on content collection and subsequent reuse, and that publishers need to know which automated agent is acting, on whose behalf, and for what purpose. Time is short: the News Media Alliance gave Meta until October 26 to respond publicly, while the terms automatically become binding on any company continuing to use Meta products after November 20 if nothing changes. The Council emphasizes that its statement represents the position of a party to a dispute, not a regulatory outcome, and that it has not published the letter itself.

What do these terms mean?

Digital Markets Act: A European law that imposes fair conditions on large platforms, designated as gatekeepers, in dealing with business users.

Web crawling: A process carried out by automated bots to read website pages and collect their content, used for indexing, search, and sometimes for training artificial intelligence models.

robots.txt file: A simple file placed in the root directory of a website that specifies to bots which paths they are allowed to visit, but it is a technical request and not legally binding according to the Council.

Interim measures: Urgent measures that a regulatory body can take before an investigation ends, to prevent damage that might be difficult to repair later.