The largest news publishing trade association in the United States is calling on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend the implementation of the company’s new commercial terms of service, set to go into effect on October 30.
In an open letter to Zuckerberg published Thursday, News/Media Alliance’s president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote that Meta should “withdraw these terms and should hold discussions around future changes with NMA and publishers.”
The terms, first reported by Nieman Lab on October 15 , would allow for the mass scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. There is currently no option to opt out. On October 16, Meta removed the word “train” from its terms and limited the use of future scraped content to “advertising and business products.” But legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised terms would still permit mass scraping.
“News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them for readers and advertisers, under duress and without compensation,” Coffey said in her letter. “It is wholly unreasonable for the mere use of a Meta business account to require publishers to grant unrestricted access to their websites (and even content posted by their users), for the benefit of Meta to develop its business products.”
NMA represents more than 2,000 news publishers in the United States. The discussions, Coffey said, should focus on four core issues:
> (i) the specific Meta Company Products and uses for which Meta would like to use publishers’ scraped content; > > (ii) how publishers can opt in to permit scraping, separate from obtaining access to Meta’s business products; > > (iii) the specific crawlers, fetchers, or other bots that will be utilized; > > (iv) how Meta will ensure publishers’ robots.txt files, registration walls, or paywalls are respected.
Coffey requested a public response from Zuckerberg to the letter by October 26, and noted that if “in the event Meta adopts these revised terms over our members’ express objections, our members do not consent to them and reserve all of their legal rights.”
The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) sent a similar letter to Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan on Thursday, while adding its concern about Meta’s implementation of its new subscription service, Meta One, which requires users to pay a fee to post links on Meta platforms. WAN-IFRA’s membership spans 20,000 publishers in 120 countries around the world.
The Center for Media and Digital Governance (CMDG) at the Open Markets Institute published its own statement on Thursday, saying that regulators in the United States should take immediate action to “stop Meta from exploiting publishers around the world.”
“If Meta gets away with this, every dominant technology company will have a blueprint for doing the same,” said CMDG director Courtney Radsch . “Regulators have an opportunity to draw a line now, before the next generation of AI monopolies is built on the uncompensated work of journalists, publishers, and creators.”
Meanwhile, publishers’ and media advocates’ concerns about the new terms of service are mounting in Europe.
On Thursday morning, the Movement for an Open Web (MOW) — a U.K. nonprofit organization that advocates for an accessible internet — filed formal complaints with the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition, calling the terms “unfair,” and “exploitative” and saying they “threaten to cause immediate and irreparable harm to businesses.”
“The terms go live in a few days’ time, and once they’re in force the damage will be done — you can’t unscrape that content,” said Tim Cowen , a MOW cofounder.
MOW’s complaints follow comments from CMA executive director for digital markets Will Hayter , who said during a parliamentary committee session on Tuesday that he had sent a letter to Meta and scheduled a meeting with company representatives to learn more about the terms. In Germany, the German Association of Free Press and the Federal Association of Digital Publishers also sent a joint letter to the European Commission, calling on the institution to block the new terms from going into effect until it conducted a complete review.
On Wednesday, four European press associations — the European Magazine Media Association, the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the European Press Council, and News Media Europe — sent a joint letter to the European Commission and its heads of technology and competition. The letter, viewed by Nieman Lab, claims that Meta’s new terms violate the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2020 to curb the dominance of big tech companies and create fairer competition across the region.
The joint letter calls on the Commission to block the terms from “taking effect in their current wording — or in any wording producing identical or similar effects — to safeguard publishers’ rights.”
“Publishers, whose content has long been subject to sweeping unfair and unlawful exploitation by dominant gatekeepers, including for AI-related purposes, thus face an unacceptable choice: abandon a key distribution channel or consent to the exploitation of their professional content without negotiation, licensing and remuneration,” the letter reads. “These conditions could also undermine publishers’ rights in ongoing or future AI-related legal proceedings.”
The Association of Information Media (AMI) in Spain, which represents more than 100 news outlets in the country,
echoed its support of the letter in a statement on Thursday.
“Technological innovation and the development of artificial intelligence cannot come at the expense of content creators’ rights or the economic viability of professional journalism,” the AMI statement reads in part. “ Defending publishers’ rights does not mean hindering innovation, but rather ensuring that it develops while respecting the law, competition, and media pluralism.”
Read the full News/Media Alliance letter here
.