The UK competition regulator opened an investigation into whether Meta's new terms let it take publishers' content for AI without a real choice.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Friday it has launched a formal investigation under the Competition Act into Meta's commercial terms for businesses that use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads (CMA). The CMA says the revised terms could let Meta collect content from those businesses' own websites and use it to build its products, including its AI features, without the businesses getting any say. It will look at whether Meta is dominant in a UK market and, if so, whether forcing these terms is an abuse of that position. Meta had planned to bring the terms in on Oct 30, pushed them to Nov 20, and on Oct 28 paused them pending talks with industry groups. Meta told Reuters there are "no grounds" for an investigation (Reuters via Euronext). Publishers say the terms offer no opt-out short of leaving Meta's business tools, and Meta's promise to respect robots.txt isn't written into them (Press Gazette).

What to watch: this is only the start of the investigation, and nothing has been decided yet. The key question is whether Meta's revised terms separate using its ad and business tools from agreeing to have your site crawled for AI. If you run a site and use Meta's business tools, your current terms still apply for now.