Article 352: The UK Opened a Case Against Meta's AI Terms Two Days After Meta Paused Them

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened a formal investigation on 30 October into the terms Meta sets for businesses using Facebook, Instagram and its ad tools. The CMA's reading of the wording: content from publishers' and advertisers' websites taken for Meta's own products, AI features among them, with no opt-out for those businesses.

Two complaints - from the News Media Association and Movement for an Open Web - got the case moving, and the CMA took it under the Competition Act 1998 specifically so it could move fast.

The sequence is the story

Meta's start date has now slipped twice: 30 October became 20 November, and on 28 October Meta paused the rollout while it consulted industry groups. The regulator then opened the case anyway.

That ordering matters. Pausing a term is not withdrawing it, and a regulator that opens a file two days after a pause is signalling it does not treat the pause as a resolution. Sarah Cardell said the CMA will push for a "swift and satisfactory resolution", which is regulator for we would rather not have to do this the slow way.

Meta also deleted a line critics read as a licence to scrape earlier in the month. Publishers argue the replacement reaches Meta's AI products just the same. Strip out the lawyerly framing and both versions arrive at the same place.

The advertiser clause nobody noticed

One section of the paused preview, AI Features, would put the legal burden for Meta's AI edits to an advert on the advertiser, per Adweek's reading. The Commercial Terms currently in force contain no such section.

So every Meta campaign running today sits under the version without that clause, and Meta has set no new date for the version that adds it. Two parallel sets of terms is not a great place to be if you are buying media.

What this case actually tests

Not whether scraping happens. Whether a platform can rewrite its commercial terms so that the customer's content, and the customer's liability, both flow one direction, with the opt-out existing only in theory.

Key Takeaway: the CMA has made no finding and says so plainly. But the fact a competition regulator, not a privacy one, opened this case is the point - AI terms are increasingly being argued as market power rather than data protection, and the remedy for market power is rather more expensive.