The European Publishers Council has gone back to Brussels for a second time over Meta’s revised Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms. The ask: examine the rules under the Digital Markets Act and EU competition law, and if interim measures cannot come before November 20, push Meta to postpone the contested provisions. The council’s verdict on Meta’s edits so far: “little has changed in substance.”
One word disappeared. The permission did not.
Meta removed the word “train” from the website-scraping clause and shifted the wording toward advertising, business products and the integrity and security of Meta’s platforms. But the council argues that a list of permitted purposes does not expressly prohibit other uses. AI grounding, fine-tuning and the display of generated answers and summaries do not require training, so deleting one word leaves them uncovered by any explicit exclusion.
Angela Mills Wade, the council’s executive director, put the point directly: the terms still seek broad permissions and still “do not expressly exclude AI grounding or the generation of AI answers and summaries.”
The authorization remains wide. The clause still covers:
- Automated access, crawling and indexing of business domains
- Caching, analysis, collection and retrieval of website content
- Creating test credentials and periodically pulling updates
Why this is an advertiser problem, not a publisher squabble
Section 7 makes acceptance automatic: keep using Meta for business purposes after notice and you agree to the update. The only way out is to stop all commercial use of Meta’s products. There is no partial opt-out that lets a brand accept the terms for a Facebook Page while refusing website crawling.
That clause reaches any URL associated with a product or service. A D2C brand that uploads a catalogue or buys ads through Ads Manager accepts the same contract as a newspaper, and the crawling authorization can touch the whole domain. The publishers’ central line is that permissions should be limited to what is necessary for the service a business actually requested.
What to check before November 20
Treat the date as a contractual deadline, not a routine platform update. Map each Meta business asset to the domains it is connected with, and ask legal to review the Commercial Terms next to the AI Features section. That section makes advertisers solely responsible for edits Meta’s AI tools make to their ads, including features Meta switches on.
Do not lean on robots.txt. The council’s position is that technical controls over crawler access cannot replace an enforceable contractual limit, and that businesses also need to know which agent is crawling and for what purpose.
The legal clock is tight. The statement does not say whether the Commission has replied, and interim measures would require opening proceedings and a prima facie finding within roughly three weeks. The News/Media Alliance in the US has separately given Meta until October 26 to respond. If no regulator or undertaking intervenes, the terms bind every business that keeps using Meta after November 20.
Source: PPC Land
