Meta has put its disputed business terms on hold, so its right to crawl linked websites will not start November 20
A notice on Meta's terms page says the existing Commercial Terms stay in effect until further notice. The proposed version would have required business page owners to let Meta crawl external sites they link to. Meta has not published a new date or a new draft.
Source
"Does Meta think we can't read?" Meta abandons sketchy commercial terms update.Ars Technica AI · Original published November 6, 2026
Meta has paused the update to its Commercial Terms that would have required Facebook business page owners to let the company crawl the external websites they link to. For publishers and other businesses with a page, the November 20, 2026, deadline no longer applies. The pause does not rule out a new version, because Meta describes it as a delay and has set no new date.
What the proposed terms would have changed
According to Ars Technica, page owners would have had no way to opt out if they wanted to keep a business page, and the terms would have required publishers to create test credentials so that Meta's bots could get past paywalls. Legal experts warned that the wording could let Meta ignore robots.txt, the file a site uses to tell automated crawlers what they may read. Meta says its crawling practices have not changed and that content owners can still use robots.txt. Ars Technica reports that Nieman Lab found no specific language on this in the revised terms.
Why Meta stepped back
The terms were first due to take effect on October 30, and Meta then moved the date to November 20, 2026. Ars Technica reports that courts in Brazil and Norway issued preliminary injunctions against them, and that US Senators Adam Schiff and Marsha Blackburn wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to withdraw them. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation on October 30, 2026, into whether the terms may be an abuse of a dominant position, and its case page still lists the case as open.
Meta has not said which of these pressures led to the pause. A spokesperson told Reuters, as quoted by Ars Technica, that the company will keep talking with stakeholders and wants to take its time.
„our existing terms remain in effect“
Sources
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