Meta Faces U.K. Antitrust Probe Over Publisher Content Terms — Update

By Edith Hancock

Meta Platforms faces an investigation from the U.K.'s competition regulator over potential new business terms that would allow the company to collect content from publishers to power its own products such as artificial intelligence tools.

The Competition and Markets Authority said Friday that Meta's now-paused terms could unfairly harm publishers and advertisers that use its services like Instagram.

Publishers have hit out at tech giants in recent months over how they scrape content to train and run tools like AI chatbots. In the U.S., a group of publishers filed a class-action suit against Meta in May that alleged the company accessed millions of books and journal articles from pirating sites to train its AI platform Llama.

Regulators have also grown concerned about AI companies' use of media. The European Commission started probing Google in December 2025 over how it uses content online to train its own services such as AI Overviews, which summarize search results. That followed a legal complaint alleging that the company unfairly directed traffic away from news websites. The U.K.'s CMA also imposed an obligation on Google this year to let publishers opt out of feeding their content to power its AI features in online searches.

Meta's planned terms could enable the company to use content from publishers' websites without offering them a choice over if or how it is used, according to the CMA.

The tech giant had originally planned to introduce the changes on Friday, but has since paused the rollout pending talks with industry groups, the CMA said.

A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that there are no grounds for an investigation. "We've already committed not to change our terms without consulting publishers and other stakeholders," the spokesperson said.

The investigation follows formal complaints from trade groups this month.

Theo Bamber, chief executive of trade body News Media Association, welcomed the CMA's investigation on Friday, saying Meta gave publishers "an invidious choice of giving away their content for free to power its AI products or leaving a platform which millions of Britons use to get their news." News UK, a member of the association, is wholly owned by News Corp, which is the parent company of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

Tim Cowen, co-founder of Movement for an Open Web, whose members include publishers and advertisers, called the delay and the CMA's probe a "significant win for the wider industry" in a statement Friday, but said regulators should do more to clamp down on what he referred to as anti-competitive practices.

Meta had previously delayed the changes to the terms to Nov. 20 after industry groups complained to both the CMA and the European Commission's competition division.

The regulator said no decision has yet been made over whether Meta broke U.K. competition law.

News Corp has a commercial agreement to supply content on Google platforms.

Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 30, 2026 12:02 ET (16:02 GMT)