Tim Cowen, Chair of the Antitrust Practice at Preiskel & Co, has advised the Movement for an Open Web on its complaint to the CMA regarding an update to Meta’s terms and conditions. This led to the CMA opening an investigation under UK competition laws.
Meta’s update, now postponed following the CMA’s investigation, allows the tech giant to use its bots to “index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs” associated with a business account, without payment for the extracted content. This would allow Meta to use the content to build AI services that compete with news publishers.
The indefinite pause on the update’s introduction is a significant win for publishers.
Tim’s role in the CMA complaint has been widely reported, including in AP News, Quartz, Stuff, The Independent, and the LA Times.