After court orders in Norway and Brazil, Meta shelves its new business conditions indefinitely
The rules would have allowed Meta to automatically crawl the websites of business customers, prompting an outcry from publishers.
Meta will not introduce its revised terms for business accounts on 20 November as planned, but has suspended them indefinitely, Nieman Lab reports. A spokesperson said the company will continue consulting stakeholders. The existing terms remain in force. The changes would have allowed Meta to use bots to crawl the domains and pages linked to business accounts, without payment.
According to the AP news agency, via ABC News, critics fear Meta would use that content to build competing AI services. In mid-October Meta removed the word train from the text and postponed the start date from 30 October to 20 November. The company says it only wants to retrieve accurate product information for ads and recommendations, and does not intend to crawl news sites.
Pressure came from several directions. A Norwegian court suspended the terms at the request of 180 media companies, and a preliminary ban followed in Brazil. The UK competition authority CMA opened an investigation and the European Commission discussed the matter with Meta. In the US, senators from both parties asked Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the plans. The Norwegian media federation MBL considers a postponement insufficient and wants a separate paid agreement for the use of journalism in AI products.