Meta faces EU, UK antitrust challenge over new business terms

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Meta EU/UK antitrust challenge

Highlights

Movement for an Open Web filed complaints with the European Commission and UK's CMA, seeking interim measures against Meta's new commercial terms set for October rollout.
Complainants allege Meta's terms would grant broad content-scraping rights to support AI services, potentially harming publishers and advertisers reliant on Meta platforms.
The European Publishers Council, Germany's BDZV, and the Association of the Free Press lodged similar objections, intensifying regulatory scrutiny of Meta's use of copyrighted content for AI.

Regulators pressed to halt October rollout

As reported by Reuters, advocacy group the Movement for an Open Web says it has filed complaints with the European Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, seeking interim measures against Meta's new commercial terms.

The group, whose members include digital advertisers and publishers, argues that the changes are anti-competitive because many businesses depend on Meta's services and would be forced to accept terms that hand over rights to digital content. Tim Cowen, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, says the terms could give Meta broad scope to scrape content from websites globally and use that material to support AI services that may later compete with the same businesses.

Meta says it disagrees with the complaint. A company spokesperson says the consolidated crawling terms apply only to its ads and business products, do not alter how Meta uses web crawlers, and do not create new rights that override content owners' existing controls such as robots.txt.

Publishing sector widens fight over AI content use

The CMA says it met Meta on Wednesday to gather more detail on the new business terms and is holding urgent discussions as it considers next steps. The European Commission does not immediately respond to requests for comment, while companies seeking interim measures must show they face serious and irreparable harm from the alleged anti-competitive conduct.

The dispute adds to a broader global clash between publishers and AI companies over the use of copyrighted material to train large language models. The latest complaint follows similar objections raised last week by the European Publishers Council and earlier this week by Germany's BDZV and the Association of the Free Press, showing growing pressure on regulators to test how competition law applies to AI-related content practices.

In our earlier article on how AI is raising the cost of standing still for companies, we explored why businesses face a widening gap between leaders that adopt AI for productivity and those that cling to traditional operating models. We noted that firms may need to rethink investment priorities, workforce skills, and decision-making as AI-driven automation and data tools lift expectations across markets and make “average” performance harder to sustain.

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