Meta said this week it is pausing updated commercial terms for business accounts after news publishers argued the language would let the company crawl websites tied to those accounts^1,2,3.

Techmeme, citing Nieman Lab, said the pause is indefinite and followed publisher outcry and court injunctions¹. CityNews Toronto, carrying The Canadian Press, quoted Meta spokesperson Julia Perreira as saying the pause would let the company engage stakeholders and "take the time to get this right"².

The Associated Press, reporting earlier on a postponement, said the rules had been scheduled to take effect Oct. 30 and would have let automated software work on domains, pages or URLs associated with a business account³. Critics said the update would have applied to business clients without payment and could have been used to build competing products, including AI services, while Meta said the change applied to ads and business products and did not alter how it uses web crawlers³.

A court in Norway on Oct. 28 granted a temporary injunction suspending the new terms at the request of about 180 Norwegian media companies, the AP reported, and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority said it was investigating whether requiring publishers and other content businesses to accept the terms could be an unfair trading condition³. Meta spokesman Andy Stone had said on Oct. 16 that the update was meant to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party sites for on-platform ads and recommendations, not to scrape news sites³.

Canadian journalism organizations whose content Meta has blocked from its platforms in response to the Online News Act were among those worried about the once-incoming policy, CityNews Toronto reported². Some Canadian publishers already use robots.txt to block bots from AI companies, and several outlets, including The Canadian Press, have sued OpenAI and Anthropic over training on copyrighted work².

What remains unknown is when, or whether, Meta will reissue revised terms, and whether European injunctions and the U.K. inquiry will still constrain any later rollout^1,2,3.