What would help, as University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel told Nieman Lab, would be for Meta to add specific language to the policy in which the company would commit to honoring robots.txt file extraction instructions. Since compliance with robots.txt is voluntary, Meta could possibly rely on legally enforceable TOS to omit mentions of robots.txt to remove sites that attempt to block scraping via robots.txt, the experts suggested.
When it comes to robots.txt, “preference can still be expressed, and unless it’s a legally enforceable preference, it can be ignored anyway,” Sobel said.
The meta reaction is global
The criticism goes beyond Nieman Lab’s reporting, as news groups around the world urge regulators to intervene and block Meta’s controversial terms from taking effect.
A chief executive of the UK News Media Association, Theo Bamber, accused Meta of a “shameless land grab” based on the “worst kind of arrogant bullying of tech platforms”. Bamber urged UK regulators to “defend British creators and the business community” by “stopping Meta from setting this terrible precedent.”
Meanwhile, the European Council of Editors has already asked the European Commission to intervene. “Publishers should be able to decide if and how their journalism is used, and negotiate fair payment,” said the group’s executive director, Angela Mills Wad. “Burying such wide-ranging claims in terms of platform is no substitute for consent.”
Similarly, Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which Nieman Lab says is the largest news publishing trade association in the United States, protested the terms as “outrageous and likely illegal.”
In the United States, Coffey urged regulators to recognize that Meta’s “decision to withhold access to its audience unless companies allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an egregious policy, bad faith, and a clear abuse of the company’s market power.”
“It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30,” Coffey said.
