The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched an investigation to examine whether Meta’s proposed commercial terms for businesses breach competition law. The regulator is assessing whether the terms could permit the tech company Meta to collect content from the websites of publishers and commercial users to develop its own products and services without giving businesses a choice regarding how their material is used.
The inquiry focuses on whether Meta holds a dominant position in a relevant UK market and whether requiring firms to accept these conditions amounts to an abuse through the imposition of unfair trading terms. Meta originally intended to roll out the revised terms on 30 October, rescheduled the implementation to 20 November following engagement with the CMA, and subsequently paused the rollout on 28 October pending consultations with industry groups.
The CMA noted that opening the investigation does not imply competition law has been broken, as no formal conclusions have been reached.
The UK investigation comes after several instances of European scrutiny over Meta’s AI expansion. Meta has already faced formal antitrust action from the European Commission, which investigated whether the company abused its dominant position by restricting third-party AI assistants from WhatsApp and subsequently ordered interim measures to restore rival access.
