An Oslo judge has suspended Meta’s new business terms while regulators in Britain and Europe look at whether they let the company harvest journalism for AI.
OSLO, Norway (Journo News) – A Norwegian court has stopped Meta from bringing in new commercial terms that publishers say would let the company scrape their websites, paywalled stories included, and feed the material into artificial intelligence products. The Oslo District Court’s interim ruling is the first legal block on terms that have set newsrooms on three continents against one of their biggest distribution channels.
What Meta’s new terms say, and what publishers fear
Meta announced changes to its Commercial Terms for business accounts on 8 October, according to Euronews. As described by the Associated Press in a report on the delay, the wording would allow Meta to use automated tools to “index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl” domains and pages linked to a business account. Every news organization with a Facebook or Instagram presence has one.
Nieman Lab was first to report that legal experts read the terms as permitting scraping of news sites. Meta then removed the word “train” from the text, but publishers argue the revised language still covers its generative AI services, and the terms do not promise to honor robots.txt, the file sites use to tell crawlers to stay out. Meta’s position, voiced by spokesman Andy Stone on X and quoted by AP, is that the update concerns pulling product information for ads and has nothing to do with scraping news sites.
The Oslo ruling and who brought the case
The Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association, known as MBL, filed its case on 27 October. Its members include Schibsted, Amedia, Polaris, Mentor Media, Dagens Naeringsliv, the public broadcaster NRK and TV2, Press Gazette reported. Accounts differ on how many companies stand behind the request: AP put it at 180 media companies, while Euronews listed ten groups. Both agree on the substance.
On 28 October the court granted a temporary injunction. The terms cannot take effect until a court has assessed their legality. MBL chair Lene Eltvik Vindfeld said the court accepted that Meta holds a dominant market position and that the terms are unreasonable, according to the association’s own release. This is an interim step, not a final judgment. A full hearing on legality is still to come.
Regulators and politicians pile in
The Norwegian case is one front among several. The key moves, as reported:
- Meta first pushed its start date from 30 October to 20 November, then said it would hold a full consultation with industry groups, which could run past 20 November, with current terms staying in force meanwhile.
- Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation on 30 October, saying the terms could amount to an unlawful imposition of unfair trading conditions.
- A European Commission spokesperson, Sara Simonini, said the Commission welcomed the delay and is checking the terms against EU rules on dominant firms and on gatekeeper platforms.
- Senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn each wrote separately to Mark Zuckerberg, and Schiff called the terms a gross abuse of power in his letter.
AP noted that no lawsuits appear to have been filed in the United States so far. The Association of American Publishers urged Meta to drop the terms, and trade groups including WAN-IFRA, News/Media Alliance and News Media Canada have asked competition authorities worldwide to step in, Press Gazette reported.
The leverage problem at the heart of the dispute
Strip away the contract language and the dispute is about leverage. Press Gazette reported that NRK’s legal director, Olav Nyhus, said the broadcaster cannot leave Facebook and Instagram because it has to reach audiences there. MBL’s complaint, as Press Gazette summarized it, is that publishers would have “no way to say no.” Critics describe the choice as all-or-nothing: accept scraping or lose the account.
A few outlets are calling that bluff. Press Gazette reported that Fjell-Ljom in Roros, Norway, plans to delete its Facebook page from 1 January, and a US outlet, McKinley Park News, is also removing its accounts. Few large publishers can follow them, which is exactly why Meta’s terms are so contested. Euronews added that since May more than 340 local and national news sites, among them The Guardian, The New York Times and USA Today, have blocked the internet archive crawler bots that gather AI training data. Publishers are already fencing off their content. Meta’s terms would let a platform reach over the fence from the inside.
What newsrooms should do now
Meta’s defenders have a point worth stating: the company says the changes concern ads and business products and do not alter how it uses web crawlers, and its consultation promise may yet produce firmer wording. Until it does, the sensible course for editors is to treat the terms as a live risk. Ask counsel to read the business-account terms in full. Confirm what is behind your paywall and who can see it through your social accounts. Record your robots.txt settings and check whether Meta’s crawlers respect them. And watch 20 November, the new date, as well as the outcome of the full Norwegian hearing.
The wider lesson is one journalism has learned before. When a distribution platform rewrites the rules, publishers who act alone lose, and publishers who organize, as Norwegian companies did within weeks, at least get a hearing. Nieman Lab’s account of Meta’s pledge to consult shows how quickly the company moved once pressure arrived from courts, regulators and legislators at the same time.
For a lighter take on the same industry, Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat cover the media circus from the comedy side at Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/