The European Union backs Italy’s right to make Meta pay for news

Meta must comply with Italian law requiring it to negotiate with and fairly compensate news publishers for the the use of their content, according to a ruling by the Europe’s highest court on Tuesday.

The decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that EU copyright law doesn’t prohibit individual countries from setting up systems that give news publishers power to negotiate compensation terms and regulatory bodies the authority to enforce national law.

The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023. Italy had enacted EU copyright directives into national law in 2021, and in 2023, it granted AGCOM the authority to request traffic and advertising data from platforms related to news content, intervene in negotiations between publishers and platforms, and fine platforms that didn’t comply with its orders. The law also allows AGCOM to define benchmarks for for fair compensation, while platforms only pay for news content they use and are not allowed to restrict the visibility of publishers’ content during negotiations. Publishers have the right to refuse the use of their content or provide it for free.

Courthouse News Service described Italy’s rules as one of “Europe’s toughest systems for making platforms negotiate over news content powering feeds, search results and online traffic.” Meta claimed that EU copyright laws were meant to protect publisher content, not create “a regulator-backed bargaining system with mandatory negotiations, transparency obligations and penalties hanging over tech companies,” according to Courthouse News Service. The Italian court referred the case to the CJEU, which heard the case in February 2025.

The ruling on Tuesday rejected those claims, saying the law was designed to allow publishers to charge for the use of their content, recoup the costs of news production, and preserve a free press.

“At a time when AI systems and platform interfaces increasingly intermediate access to journalism, this ruling sends a very clear signal: quality journalism has value, and dominant platforms cannot simply appropriate it on their own terms,” Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

“The rights established in Article 15 imply, by their nature, that publishers of press publications may make the authorization of those uses subject to any remuneration which they deem appropriate,” the judgment reads. “…Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 is intended to ensure that those publishers may recoup the investments required by the production of those publications with such a remuneration. In those circumstances, an information society service provider cannot validly argue that a national legislature fails to have regard to that directive when it establishes a system intended to ensure fair remuneration for those publishers.”

The ruling also refuted Meta’s claims that the law hinders competition and its ability to conduct business in the country. Instead, the court said the law aims to level the playing field between publishers and platforms by requiring the platforms to provide financial data about their use of news content — information publishers didn’t previously have access to.

“Only information society service providers possess the information enabling the economic value of online use of press publications to be assessed, such as the revenues generated by or expected from such use, with the result that publishers of press publications are in a weaker negotiating position than those providers as regards the determination of the remuneration at issue,” the ruling reads. “Furthermore, the obligation to refrain from limiting the visibility of publications in search results during negotiations between those providers and those publishers serves to prevent pressure being exerted on those publishers or the economic value of the use of their press publications being concealed.”