News/Media Alliance sends open letter to Zuckerberg demanding Meta withdraw AI-scraping Commercial Terms

On October 22, 2026, the News/Media Alliance sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a three-page open letter demanding that Meta fully withdraw its revised Commercial Terms before they take effect on October 30, 2026. The Arlington, Virginia trade association, which says it represents more than 2,000 U.S. newspaper, magazine and digital-media publishers, argues the crawling clause in the terms amounts to an exercise of market power: it would require every business using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger through a business account to grant Meta what the letter calls extraordinary and disproportionate privileges to access and collect content from linked websites, with no way to decline short of abandoning Meta's business products. The letter says the October 17 narrowing of the clause - which deleted the word 'train' after warnings from Nieman Lab and legal experts - was cosmetic, because the remaining language (use to 'develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products') is undefined; Cornell professor James Grimmelmann is quoted calling the revised wording 'still broad enough to drive a truck through.' The Alliance asked Zuckerberg to respond publicly by October 26, stating its members 'do not consent' to the terms and 'reserve all of their legal rights' - a formal precursor to legal action. The letter also claims Meta already owes US publishers roughly $2 billion a year for their content, a figure drawn from a 2024 Columbia University working paper, and set four conditions for talks: name the products and uses, offer a scraping opt-in separate from business-tool access, identify the crawlers, and commit to respecting robots.txt, registration walls and paywalls.