Meta has deferred the rollout of revised business terms affecting website publishers, moving the implementation date from 30 October to 20 November, according to Reuters. The postponement grants the company an additional three weeks, though the contested language in the agreement has not been modified. Publishers contend that these terms authorize Meta to automatically extract content from their sites for use in developing its products.
The decision to delay came immediately following a formal request from the News/Media Alliance, representing over 2,000 US publishers, calling on Meta to abandon the terms entirely. A Meta representative explained that the extension would "allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."
Despite the reprieve, Meta intends to proceed with the policy as drafted. The company noted that website owners retain the ability to employ robots.txt files—a standard mechanism for instructing web crawlers which pages to exclude—to communicate their preferences. Meanwhile, some technology firms have begun offering publishers greater autonomy: Cloudflare, for instance, now blocks AI training crawlers as a default setting across many advertising-supported pages.
The new terms apply to organizations utilizing Meta's suite of business offerings, including advertising tools, Facebook Pages, and Instagram business accounts. Under these terms, Meta gains authorization to deploy automated systems to crawl websites connected to those accounts and leverage the extracted material to enhance its advertising and commercial offerings. Businesses implicitly consent to the terms simply by using these tools.
Meta removed the word "train" from the terms following widespread criticism the previous week. However, publishers maintain that the revised wording still permits AI training activities. Five major publishers are currently pursuing litigation against Meta, alleging the company unlawfully harvested their books to develop its Llama models.
The News/Media Alliance contended in its letter to Mark Zuckerberg that publishers cannot effectively prevent Meta's automated systems from accessing their content, since their advertising operations depend on allowing such crawlers. "News publishers will be forced into providing their valuable journalism to support the development of products that may be used to compete with them," the letter stated.
Resistance is intensifying across the Atlantic as well. European publishers have petitioned regulators in both the EU and the UK to halt implementation of the terms. Britain's competition authority has separately requested that Meta provide clarification regarding the policy.
Source: The Next Web
