Meta pauses new business terms that would let it crawl publishers’ websites

Meta has paused planned changes to its rules for businesses and advertisers. Among other things, the new rules would have let it crawl the websites of firms that use its apps.

The changes were due to take effect on November 20, but Meta’s existing terms will stay in place for now, Reuters reported on Friday.

The pause covers four sets of rules: Meta’s Commercial Terms, Product Catalog Terms, Self-Serve Ad Terms and Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. The Commercial Terms apply to any business using Meta’s products, including one that simply runs a Facebook Page.

“We’re pausing the changes as we continue to engage with stakeholders and take our time to get this right,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

The decision follows weeks of criticism, mostly from news publishers. The new terms would have let Meta use automated software to crawl pages linked to a business and pull updates from them.

Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the content could then be used to train Meta’s AI.

Meta has said the update only brought together crawling rules that were already spread across several documents. It also said site owners can still block its crawler with robots.txt, a file that tells bots which pages they may visit. The terms themselves did not say so.

The changes were first set for October 30, but Meta pushed them back to November 20 after publishers and advertisers complained to EU and UK regulators. It later promised to fully consult news industry leaders before going ahead.

Meanwhile, the pressure kept growing. A Norwegian court temporarily blocked the terms after a lawsuit by Norway’s association of media companies, Nieman Lab reported, citing broadcaster NRK.

Regulators have also been watching closely. The UK’s competition watchdog said it would keep looking at the terms, and the European Commission said it was assessing a complaint from publishers, according to Search Engine Journal.

In the US, senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn both wrote to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to withdraw the terms as written.

Meta has not said when it will bring back the changes, or whether the crawling rules will be revised.