WAN-IFRA wants Meta to withdraw business terms that publishers say could make use of Meta’s commercial platforms conditional on allowing automated crawling of websites associated with a business. Diario de Navarra reported that Meta said on October 28 it would consult industry groups before changing policy and keep the existing terms in force meanwhile.
What WAN-IFRA wants Meta to change
WAN-IFRA is asking Meta to withdraw the disputed terms and let publishers refuse additional collection or reuse of their content without losing access, distribution or referral traffic. The organization says publishers of every size should have that choice, and that access to journalism should be negotiated and remunerated.
Meta’s reported consultation commitment
According to Diario de Navarra, Meta said it would consult industry groups and leaders before making policy changes. The report said Meta’s existing terms would remain in force during that process. WAN-IFRA wants the provisions withdrawn, rather than simply held back.
The wording change and the crawl provision
15M reported that revised terms removed an explicit reference to using collected content to train Meta’s products while retaining a provision for automated crawling of domains, pages and URLs associated with business products or services. A crawler is software that automatically visits web pages. The report also described Meta’s position as being that its crawling practices were not changing and that website owners could signal preferences through robots.txt.
The Verge’s October 23 explainer covers the earlier terms revision and publisher response, before the reported October 28 consultation commitment.
The separate court action in Norway
15M reported that on October 28 the Oslo District Court barred Meta from introducing the disputed conditions in Norway until their legality is settled. The report said ten Norwegian media companies were behind the case.
