NMA urges ministers to back CMA over Meta terms

The NMA says Meta’s controversial new Commercial Terms could force publishers to choose between allowing Meta to scrape their websites for AI or losing access to audiences on Facebook.

The letter calls on Ministers to give the CMA explicit, public backing to secure commitments from Meta and to press Meta directly to change the Terms. It argues that Meta’s conduct is a key test of the Government’s Strategic Steer and its commitment to properly resourcing the CMA, particularly after a period in which Ministers appeared to encourage a lighter-touch approach to Big Tech.

It sets out that the CMA is best placed globally to act quickly, using the prospect of formal enforcement as leverage, as it did to secure commitments from Microsoft and AWS on cloud services. The letter follows Meta’s decision to delay the terms from 30 October to 20 November, which NMA chief executive Theo Bamber described as “a pause, not a solution.”

Since then, Meta has made a further concession, pledging to consult publishers before finalising the terms and potentially delaying implementation again. Separately, a Norwegian court has temporarily blocked the terms for publishers in Norway.

While the Norwegian ruling only applies there, both developments add to the pressure on Meta and underline the NMA’s call for action in the UK.

The letter, dated 27 October 2026, is written to The Rt Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and The Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and is reproduced in full below:

Dear Secretaries of State,

I am writing to ask for your urgent intervention before 20 November to stop Meta introducing changes to its Commercial Terms that would seriously harm news publishers and many other UK businesses.

If Meta proceeds as planned, businesses will have to grant Meta the right to crawl their websites and use what it collects to develop its products – potentially including AI products – to continue using a Meta business account. There is no commitment to respect publishers’ crawling preferences. Meta can only do this because of its strategic position, resulting from substantial and entrenched market power. This power must be recognised and addressed directly.

Meta has already amended the wording of the Terms once and has now paused implementation after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) intervened. Neither step resolves the problem, but engagement from the regulator is clearly effective.

Rapid action is still needed, and we ask you to:

1. give the CMA explicit, public backing to secure commitments from Meta, including by leveraging the prospect of Strategic Market Status (SMS) designation in accordance with the regulator’s assessment of Meta’s market power; and
2. press Meta directly to change the Terms.

We fully support the CMA’s independence. Here, we are asking you to make clear that it can exercise its powers robustly and independently in the interests of UK businesses and consumers, not to direct it to take a particular course of action. We are clear that public support for an independent regulator is not a substitute for the regulator’s own expert judgement.

Publishers face an invidious choice: hand over their journalism to Meta without payment or withdraw from the platforms through which millions of UK citizens find news.

Canada illustrates the consequences of news disappearing from these platforms: when Meta removed news from Facebook and Instagram there in 2023, mis- and disinformation filled the void.

The Terms therefore threaten not only the long-term sustainability of news publishing, but an immediate loss of trusted information online. They also cut directly across DCMS’s aims in the Media Green Paper: prominence for trusted news is pointless if that news is no longer produced, or if publishers have been compelled to withdraw it.

Meta must commit to:

- not make consent to the crawling of a business’s website, whether for AI training or for developing its other products, a condition of access to Meta business accounts;

- not ignore publishers’ stated preferences on crawling and scraping of their websites; and

- give the CMA prior notice of any future changes to these Terms, so that the regulator can assess them before they take effect.

The Terms must not come into effect until these issues are resolved, both through amendments to the Terms and through public commitments to the CMA. The CMA must have clear public backing from government to pursue those commitments, including through leveraging the prospect of SMS designation.

The CMA is the competition authority best placed anywhere in the world to secure swift commitments from Meta, even though Meta has not been designated with SMS.

The threat of designation was sufficient to secure commitments from Microsoft and Amazon in cloud services, and the CMA has defended commitments as being a faster, more effective route to good results for UK businesses in some cases.

But the flexibility provided by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA) leaves the CMA exposed without explicit political backing. As IPPR’s recent Bottleneck Britain report set out: “The CMA has significant discretion to set its own agenda, rather than following a fixed EU-style rulebook. But this means the CMA’s pace is set as much by political appetite as by law. Without sustained backing, flexibility becomes a lever that industry can lean on to slow the regulator down.” IPPR concluded that with “government actively taking incumbents’ side, it becomes almost impossible for the CMA to move fast”.

The Government has defended its Strategic Steer to the CMA and the personnel changes at the regulator, saying they “get the balance right” in ensuring the UK has a “competitive dynamic economy and also making sure we have a pro-business environment, a growth environment”, and that these changes must be “allowed to bed in”. Meta’s conduct is a direct test of whether that framework allows the regulator to stop anticompetitive conduct by tech giants from harming UK businesses and consumers.

The record so far is not encouraging. More than two years after the DMCCA was passed, the CMA has not designated Meta, despite stating in 2020 that it was “highly likely” Meta would meet the threshold. This reflects both the Steer, which in effect guided the CMA to prioritise inward investment over robust enforcement of competition law, and resourcing: the Digital Markets Unit employs around 100 people, against the 200 originally promised. The CMA can levy designated firms for its digital markets costs, but that money returns to HM Treasury, which sets the CMA’s budget.

The CMA’s Chief Executive appeared to acknowledge this in Committee last week: “If there is a desire for the CMA ultimately to do more, there would be opportunities to relax the rules around the levy funding and grow our resource that way”. She maintained that the CMA “have the resource we need to deliver the programme of work that we are currently planning”, but the ambition of that programme has itself been limited by Government direction and resource constraints. The Government has not given the CMA the resources to designate further firms that clearly meet the threshold.

If the Government maintains that its Steer and its resourcing of the CMA are sufficient to tackle clear anticompetitive threats to UK businesses and consumers, Meta’s Terms are a key test.

Where the CMA has discretion over interventions and remedies, the Steer asks it to consider:

- prioritising pro-growth and pro-investment interventions: the Terms would allow Meta to take, without payment, content that UK publishers invest heavily to produce, undermining both that investment and the emerging market for licensing content to AI and technology firms that the Government has said it wants to see develop;

- focusing on markets and harms that particularly impact UK-based consumers and businesses: the harm falls directly on UK publishers, on every UK business that relies on a Meta business account to reach its customers, and on UK citizens’ access to trusted news; and

- supporting growth and competitiveness in the Industrial Strategy’s eight growth-driving sectors: publishing is part of the creative industries, one of those eight sectors. Free access to content Meta’s competitors must pay for also distorts competition in AI, which sits within another (digital and technologies).

The Steer also asks the CMA to consider action by competition authorities in other jurisdictions. That comparison makes the case for the CMA acting. The EU Digital Markets Act does not allow tailored commitments to be agreed, instead relying on static rules in legislation. When Meta changed its WhatsApp Business terms to exclude rival AI assistants in October 2025, the European Commission did not impose interim measures until June 2026. In the United States there is no equivalent ex ante regime, and the Federal Trade Commission’s monopolisation case against Meta failed in court last year. Publishers have weeks, not months. Only the CMA can move on that timescale.

Finally, the Steer states that the Government is “committed to supporting the CMA to deliver on this steer”. Here, that support must be explicit and public, particularly given the absence of any public support from the Government to date.

Meta’s Terms raise a question that goes beyond this case: whether UK businesses can rely on the regime Parliament created to protect them from the most powerful global platforms. The CMA has already shown it is willing to engage. Whether that engagement delivers will depend in part on whether the Government is seen to stand behind it in using the full extent of its powers.

We therefore urge you, before 20 November, to state publicly that the CMA has your full support in securing the commitments set out above, or any other remedies it independently judges effective, and to raise the Terms directly with Meta.

Yours sincerely,

Theo Bamber

Chief Executive, News Media Association

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