Meta delays commercial terms to November 20 after publisher complaints

Meta postponed the effective date of its updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms by three weeks after publishers and advertisers objected to how the rules could apply to their websites and content. The revised terms will now take effect on November 20, rather than October 30.

The company said the extension would give it more time to explain to partners and other stakeholders what is and is not changing. The new date changes the timetable, but the available evidence does not show whether Meta revised the disputed wording when it postponed the effective date.

The postponement follows Meta’s earlier commercial-terms update, which prompted disputes over website crawling and content use. Publishers and digital advertisers argue that the updated language could give Meta broad rights to crawl and use material from their websites, including for AI-related purposes. Meta rejects the characterization that the terms grant it an unlimited right to use that content for AI services.

Meta also said it would provide more detail about how its web crawlers operate and clarify that website owners can continue to use robots.txt to signal their crawler preferences. Robots.txt is a file websites use to tell automated systems which pages they should or should not access; whether those signals alter Meta’s contractual rights under the updated terms remains disputed.

The European Publishers Council said the postponement did not resolve its concern that maintaining a business page or advertising a subscription should not confer general rights over a publisher’s website and archive. The group said uses beyond a service a publisher requested should require separate authorization.