Meta Pauses Commercial Terms After Court Fights

Meta’s page announcing the new commercial terms now carries a different message. “These updates are now paused and will not take effect on November 20, 2026,” it says, according to 404 Media, which quoted the page on November 5. The terms had been three weeks old when Meta backed off.

I covered the first round of this fight in Meta deleted one word from its business terms after publishers complained. This is the sequel, and it has more lawyers.

The dates, in order

October 15: Nieman Lab flags that the new terms let Meta crawl any website tied to a business account and use the content for its products. Meta later cut the word “train” and narrowed the stated purpose to advertising and business products, as Press Gazette and 404 Media both describe it. (404 Media says the Los Angeles Times reported the change first, so outlets differ on who broke it.)

October 27: Norway’s publishers’ association, MBL, asks the Oslo District Court for a temporary injunction. Its argument, quoted by Press Gazette, is that every article and picture, even behind paywalls, could be scraped, and the only way out is deleting your account.

October 28: the court sides with the publishers for now. Press Gazette reports that it said the legality of the terms has to be reviewed by a court before they can come into effect. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said a consultation “could extend beyond November 20.”

October 30: the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority opens a Competition Act investigation into whether Meta abused a dominant position with these terms. The CMA’s page adds that Meta had already announced a pause on October 28 pending a consultation with industry groups. A Meta spokesman told ITV News there were “no grounds for a competition investigation.” The CMA’s own timetable runs through January 2027 for early information gathering.

November 3: a São Paulo civil court suspends the crawling clause for members of three Brazilian press associations, with a daily penalty of 1 million reais capped at 100 million, according to PPC Land. I couldn’t read the order itself, so treat the details as that outlet’s account.

November 5: the pause.

Where each front stands

Front	What’s on record	Source
Norway	Oslo court order of October 28; legality must be reviewed first	Press Gazette
UK	CMA investigation opened October 30; early information gathering to January 2027	CMA
Brazil	São Paulo injunction of November 3 for three press associations’ members	PPC Land
Meta	Update paused November 5; existing terms stay; no new date	404 Media

What the pause covers

Meta’s notice names four documents: the Commercial Terms, the Product Catalog Terms, the Self-Serve Ad Terms and the Ad Creative Generative AI Terms. It says Meta is “continuing to consult with stakeholders,” will share more “when we have more to share,” and that “our existing terms remain in effect.”

So nothing was withdrawn. There’s no new date, no new wording, and no statement that Meta won’t try again.

What’s still open

The CMA’s case page says it will look at whether Meta’s “existing commercial terms, or revisions to those terms,” amount to an abuse of a dominant position. My read: that wording matters, because a pause on the revision doesn’t obviously close an inquiry into the current terms. I found no report saying what happens to the Norwegian, Brazilian or UK proceedings now, and I’d be guessing if I told you.

Press Gazette also notes that Meta has said it will respect robots.txt blocks on AI scraping, but that promise isn’t written into the terms. Nothing in the pause adds it.

My read

My read: Meta hasn’t said why it paused, but the timing follows three outside pressures in a row. A rewrite of one word didn’t settle anything. A judge in Oslo, then a regulator, then a judge in Brazil each got involved first.

My read: a pause is what a company announces when it wants to keep the option. If Meta comes back, the thing to check is whether the sentence about crawling associated websites survives, and whether robots.txt is finally in the text. The first round showed that “train” was the word people noticed, while the crawling permission was the part lawyers worried about.

For anyone running a business page, nothing changes today, according to Meta’s notice: your existing terms still apply.

Note on sources: I could not open Nieman Lab's own story or Ars Technica's (both blocked automated access), so the pause wording is taken from 404 Media's quote of Meta's page. The Brazil details rest on PPC Land alone.

Meta paused its scraping terms after a court, a regulator and its own rewrite failed to settle it