October 28, 2026
Publishers Demand That Meta Drop Onerous New Terms of Service
Today publishers called on Meta to drop its onerous new commercial terms of service, which would give the mega-corporation virtually unlimited rights to use its vast army of “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents” to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them)” that are associated with business users products or services.
Statement from Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers
In putting forth these onerous terms of service Meta is implicitly acknowledging that permission is required for them to use creative works to develop and improve their products. But at the same time this mega-corporation is abusing its dominant market power by compelling such consent from any commercial user who connects to any of their platforms.
In terms of practical effect, this policy would unreasonably expropriate valuable intellectual property from authors and publishers that is completely unconnected with their commercial use of Meta, while at the same time leverage Meta’s market power to give it an unfair advantage over its competitors.
AAP has long advocated for a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas, a marketplace threatened by the alarming dominance of a few tech platforms that wield extraordinary leverage over competitors, users, the government, and the public. These terms represent the latest such threat and are an appalling landgrab of unprecedented proportion that must not be tolerated.