European Publishers Council writes to EU Commission a second time over Meta's Commercial Terms, seeking DMA scrutiny and postponement

What happened

The European Publishers Council, a Brussels-based trade body for news publishers, published a statement on 23 October 2026 saying it had written a second time to the European Commission about Meta's revised Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms. The statement was published the same day Meta moved the terms' effective date from 30 October to 20 November 2026. The council asked the Commission to scrutinise the terms under the Digital Markets Act and EU competition law, including whether access to designated services was being made conditional on unfair terms, and, if interim measures could not be adopted before 20 November, to seek an immediate undertaking from Meta to postpone the contested provisions until the Commission had completed its assessment.

What the council says has not changed

• Removing the word "train" from the website-crawling clause does not, in the council's view, expressly exclude AI training, fine-tuning, grounding, or the generation and display of AI answers and summaries. The council wants those uses expressly excluded unless separately authorised.
• The authorisation remains extensive, covering automated access, indexing, caching, analysis, collection and retrieval of website content, the creation of test credentials, and periodic collection of updates.
• The terms provide no express contractual mechanism to refuse the additional permissions while continuing to use Meta's business services; uses beyond those necessary to provide the requested service should, the council says, require separate, express authorisation from the relevant rightsholder, without loss of access or penalties.
• Technical controls such as robots.txt cannot substitute for clear, enforceable contractual limits on collection and reuse, the council argues, and publishers need to know which automated agent is acting, on whose behalf and for what purpose.
• The council asked Meta to explain precisely what it intends to collect, why that collection is necessary, and how the material may subsequently be used.

Status and limits

This is an advocacy position from a party to the dispute, not a regulatory finding: the council has not published the letter itself, and neither Meta nor the Commission is quoted in the statement. No Commission response or decision is reported. The council's argument for urgency is irreversibility: once content has been collected and incorporated into datasets, models or competing services, restoring control may be extremely difficult.