Report from Reuters
In Brief – Meta will delay implementing its updated commercial terms of service until November 20 to address concerns from some publishers that the changes could grant the digital giant unlimited rights to scrape their content for AI services. EU and UK antitrust authorities have received complaints that the new terms, which were scheduled for October 30, are unfair. Meta hopes the delay could help stave off potential regulatory action. A company spokesperson said the extension would allow more time to explain the changes to stakeholders and emphasize that content owners can continue using robots.txt files to communicate preferences to web crawlers and AI bots. The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, welcomed the delay. However, the European Publishers Council reiterated its criticism that Meta’s terms lacked clear contractual safeguards against unrelated exploitation of publishers’ content and called for regulators to suspend Meta’s terms while investigating.
Context – Media companies have been tirelessly lobbying for years to have governments compel Google and Meta to pay them when news content appears on their platforms. Many publishers argue that the two platforms benefit from their media content and that the web giants’ advertising revenues have unfairly supplanted ad revenues of the publishers. In many ways, complaints over how AI developers use online content to train and operate their services sound like an extension of the ad revenue fight. As with nearly all digital regulatory issues, European officials are more responsive than US counterparts. And responding more rapidly to AI market developments than they did on earlier digital market issues appears to be a clear priority. For example, the EU Commission has ordered Meta to allow AI companies, including giants like OpenAI, to use WhatsApp to interact with European users without charges, Google has been directed to give AI developers equal access to Android devices, and Google is being investigated by the Commission for its AI search policies and may soon be directed to give publishers the ability to opt-out of AI-enabled search in the manner recently ordered by the UK CMA.