Meta paused a proposed commercial-terms change requiring businesses to let it crawl websites linked to Facebook pages, delaying a plan that would expand its access to external material.
Meta said its existing terms remain in effect during consultations. It has not announced a new effective date. The rollout was first set for Oct. 30 and later moved to Nov. 20. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, wrote Oct. 28 that the company would delay the change again if talks with industry groups continued past Nov. 20.
The proposal tied continued commercial use of a Facebook page to permission for Meta to collect material from linked external sites. It offered businesses no separate route to reject the crawling condition.
An early version allowed the collected material to be used for training and product development. A later revision removed the explicit training reference but left product development in scope. Theo Bamber, chief executive of the U.K.’s News Media Association, said that remaining permission was still a concern for publishers.
The proposal also would have required publishers to supply test credentials for Meta to reach paywalled sites. Meta said its crawler practices had not changed and that website operators could use robots.txt to state preferences, but the proposed wording did not expressly promise those settings would be honored.
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is examining whether Meta’s market position could give it access to publishers’ material for AI training, a subject in EconoTimes’ earlier report on the regulator’s inquiry.
