(CN) - Meta can no longer simply post, profit and walk away from Europe's news industry after the European Union's top court on Tuesday backed Italy's push to force tech giants into paying publishers for the journalism keeping their platforms alive.
Meta dragged Italy's publisher-payment rules all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union after the country rolled out one of Europe's toughest systems for making platforms negotiate over news content powering feeds, search results and online traffic.
Following the European Union's 2019 copyright overhaul aimed at helping publishers recover money from online use of their journalism, Italy gave communications regulator AGCOM powers to demand traffic and advertising data tied to news content, intervene when negotiations collapse and fine platforms that refuse to cooperate.
Meta argued the European copyright rewrite created only a narrow protection for publishers, not a regulator-backed bargaining system with mandatory negotiations, transparency obligations and penalties hanging over tech companies. The company also claimed the rules unlawfully interfered with its freedom to conduct business.
Judges in Luxembourg rejected that argument, finding that EU law leaves countries room to build systems designed to make publishers' rights work in practice rather than only on paper.
In the court's view, the ability to negotiate payment is already built into publishers' rights, which "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 judges wrote.
At the same time, the court stressed that publishers still have the final say over their content. Countries cannot force publishers to license material against their will or prevent them from allowing platforms to use it for free if they choose.
European lawmakers rewrote the bloc's copyright rules in 2019 after years of complaints that Google, Facebook and other platforms were turning news into clicks, engagement and advertising cash while publishers watched the money drain away. The changes gave publishers new rights over online use of their articles, headlines and snippets in an effort to give the news industry at least some leverage against Silicon Valley giants.
The project was also sold as a defense of journalism itself, not just a battle over licensing fees and web traffic. In the judgment, the court pointed back to that broader idea, writing that "a free and pluralist press is essential to ensure quality journalism and citizens' access to information."
Meta separately argued AGCOM's powers distorted competition and contractual freedom by effectively forcing platforms into negotiations under threat of fines and regulatory intervention.
Italy countered that publishers were walking into those talks almost blind while platforms alone held the traffic numbers, advertising data and visibility metrics showing how much money news content actually generates online.
The court largely sided with Italy. "Only information society service providers possess the information enabling the economic value of online use of press publications to be assessed," the judges found.
That imbalance, the judges said, gives governments room to step in before negotiations become little more than tech giants dictating terms to a weaker industry. The court also rejected Meta's argument that the rules unlawfully interfered with its freedom to conduct business, finding the restrictions were tied to broader public-interest goals linked to protecting publishers and keeping independent journalism financially alive.
Angela Mills Wade, executive director of media industry group the European Publishers Council, called the decision "a very important ruling which will pave the way for fairer negotiations with gatekeepers which have been abusing their dominance by refusing to negotiate in good faith."
She said the judgment could finally give publishers practical leverage in negotiations that for years often existed more on paper than in reality, especially as AI-generated summaries, conversational search tools and other platform-driven uses of news content rapidly expanded.
"Quality journalism depends on the ability of publishers to recoup the investments required to produce trusted news and information," Mills Wade added.
Not everyone welcomed the ruling.
Giuseppe Colangelo, associate professor of law and economics at the University of Basilicata, warned the judgment could push Europe even further toward a patchwork of national rules as countries build their own publisher-payment systems around online news content.
He said several governments, including Italy, Belgium and Poland, have already moved beyond traditional copyright protections by creating negotiation frameworks inspired by Australia's hard-line bargaining code for tech platforms.
"Unfortunately, today's judgment appears to validate these distinctive forms of implementation of the Copyright Directive," Colangelo said, warning the ruling could encourage more countries to follow the same path and deepen legal fragmentation across Europe's digital market.
"It is now for the European legislator to consider, in the context of the forthcoming review process, whether the Copyright Directive should be reconsidered in order to ensure more effectively the attainment of its primary objective, namely the protection of the Digital Single Market, " he added.
Meta and Italy's communications regulator AGCOM did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The case now heads back to Italy's Regional Administrative Court for Lazio, which must apply the ruling to Meta's challenge against AGCOM's system. The European Union's top court has already settled the legal question, leaving Meta with far less room to resist the tougher bargaining rules publishers across Europe have been pushing for.
Courthouse News reporter Eunseo Hong is based in the Netherlands.
Source: Courthouse News Service
