The Court of Justice has ruled that Italy’s AGCOM can require Meta to pay publishers for news snippets, the first time the bloc’s top court has weighed in directly.
Meta lost its bid to overturn an Italian regulatory order requiring it to compensate publishers for the use of their news snippets, after the Court of Justice of the European Union sided on Tuesday with Italy’s telecoms watchdog AGCOM in Case C-797/23.
The ruling is the first time the EU’s top court has weighed in on whether member states may oblige platforms to pay for publishers’ content, and it has settled the question in favour of the publishers.
“The right of publishers of press publications to fair remuneration is permissible,” the court wrote, “provided that such remuneration constitutes consideration for the authorisation granted to providers to reproduce those publications or to make them available to the public.”
Publishers, the court added, retain the right to refuse authorisation altogether, or to grant it free of charge.
The case arrived in Luxembourg via Italy, where AGCOM in 2023 set out a model under which information-service providers, including Meta and Google, would be required to negotiate compensation with publishers for the online use of their journalism.
The decree gave AGCOM the authority to define how fair remuneration is calculated, to intervene where talks break down, and to demand information from platforms about the data underlying their use of publishers’ content. Meta challenged the implementation, arguing the Italian model clashed with EU law.
The Italian courts referred the question upward; the CJEU has now ruled the model is consistent with the bloc’s 2019 copyright directive.
Crucially, the court endorsed AGCOM’s authority to require platforms to share the data needed to calculate fair compensation. That asymmetry, where only the platforms know what each piece of content is worth to them commercially, has been the publishers’ chief grievance throughout half a decade of negotiations across Europe.
The judgment treats the information obligation as a precondition of the bargaining process rather than an intrusion into it.
The European Publishers Council called the decision “crucial”, noting that it lands at a moment when AI-driven uses of journalistic content are accelerating.
The council and its members had filed in support of Italy’s position, and the ruling now hands publishers across the bloc a stronger procedural hand in negotiations with the largest platforms.
Meta said it was reviewing the judgment. The company has consistently argued that requiring it to pay for the use of links and snippets risks distorting the open web, a position it has held in similar disputes elsewhere in Europe and in Canada, where it ultimately removed news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay. Whether Meta takes the same route in Italy is now the operative question.
The judgment is a preliminary ruling, which sends the dispute back to the Italian courts to apply the CJEU’s interpretation. In practice, that means AGCOM’s framework survives, and Meta’s room to litigate the underlying principle has narrowed considerably.
The remaining arguments will be procedural: how the remuneration is set in any given negotiation, how disputes are resolved, and what the data-sharing obligation looks like in practice.
For Italy, the ruling is a vindication of a regulatory model that other member states have watched closely.
France adopted a different but related approach in 2019, leading to the Google-AFP and Google-Le Monde licensing agreements; Spain went its own way; Germany has fought its battles in domestic courts.
The Italian model, with AGCOM at its centre, now carries an EU-court imprimatur that the others do not.
The Court of Justice will not revisit the case. The procedural ball is back with the Italian judges. What comes next is the negotiation that AGCOM’s decree was always built to enable.
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