Meta Delays Its New Business Rules Until November 20
Meta will not enforce its new business terms until November 20. A spokesperson told The Verge that the start date has moved back from October 30. The company says it needs the extra time to explain the changes to its partners and stakeholders.
Daniel Roberts, Meta's spokesperson, said the delay gives the company time to explain how it uses web crawlers. A web crawler is an automated program that visits websites and copies what it finds there. He also said website owners can still use robots.txt to state their preferences.
Robots.txt is a set of instructions that a site owner places on a website to tell crawlers which areas to avoid. Think of it as a "please do not enter" sign on a door, not a lock. Crawlers are not forced to obey it. Whether one does depends on the crawler's own choice.
The terms have drawn criticism since Nieman Lab first reported on the AI-focused update on October 15. As that report described it, starting October 30, business accounts would agree to Meta scraping, meaning automatically collecting content from, their websites just by continuing to use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the new terms would allow the scraping of news sites.
Two days later, Meta removed language from its commercial terms that had raised concerns about scraping and AI training. Those concerns did not go away. The News/Media Alliance sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding that the company revise its business terms, citing severe harm to publishers.
On October 22, the pressure moved to regulators. Digital advertisers and publishers in the European Union and the United Kingdom asked antitrust regulators to suspend Meta Platforms' new commercial terms. They also urged those regulators to force the company to stop them. The delay gives EU and UK authorities time to consider that request before the terms take effect.
For publishers and their technical staff, the way consent works is the difficult part. Agreeing by simply continuing to use a platform is different from opting in, where you actively sign up. A website owner who never signed a new agreement may still find its content covered.
Robots.txt lets site owners state their preferences. As reported, though, the terms would make that signal the main tool they have. Staff who manage crawl settings will want the details of Meta's user agents, which are the names crawlers use to identify themselves, and how those names are documented. They will need that information before deciding what to block.
In my view, November 20 matters less as a deadline than as a window. Meta has been given time to explain what is changing and what is not. Publishers, advertisers and regulators have the same time to check those explanations against the actual wording. Whether the company narrows the consent process, or keeps it and documents it better, will determine whether this ends in a revised contract, a regulatory action, or a smaller set of crawl controls that website owners can rely on.
