Europe's highest court backs Italy's power to make Meta pay publishers

For years, Europe's newspapers have made a blunt argument: the platforms that distribute and profit from their journalism should pay for it. On 12 May, the European Union's highest court told them they are within their rights to insist.

Ruling in Luxembourg, the Court of Justice of the European Union found that EU law does not prevent a member state from forcing online platforms - Meta among them - to sit down and negotiate fair payment with press publishers for the use of their content. The decision, in Case C-797/23, upholds the legal machinery Italy assembled to make that obligation real, and it effectively clears the path for any other capital tempted to do the same.

What the judges actually said

The Court's core finding is narrow in form but broad in consequence: a right to fair compensation for press publishers is "consistent with EU law", provided the money is genuine consideration for letting a platform use the publications. The judges attached conditions that cut both ways. Publishers must remain free to refuse a platform's request, or to grant it for nothing; and no platform can be made to pay for content it does not actually use.

Crucially, the Court blessed the parts of the Italian system that publishers care about most. Platforms can be required to enter negotiations without throttling the visibility of a title's content while the talks run, and to hand over the data needed to calculate what that content is worth. Those duties limit a company's freedom to conduct its business, the Court acknowledged - but they are "justified", because only the platforms hold the information that reveals what the journalism is really worth, leaving publishers in a structurally weaker position.

That trade-off, the Court said, strikes "a fair balance" between a platform's freedom to conduct a business, on one side, and on the other the publishers' intellectual-property rights and "the right to freedom and pluralism of the media". It also signed off on the enforcement teeth: AGCOM may set the criteria, fix the figure when the two sides deadlock, and penalise platforms that withhold the data or refuse to deal. Those powers, the judges held, are permissible precisely because they make the publishers' rights effective rather than theoretical.

How the case reached Luxembourg

The dispute began in Rome. Italy had written the EU's 2019 Copyright Directive into national law and then, in 2023, handed its communications regulator, AGCOM, the job of setting the criteria for fair payment, arbitrating when the two sides could not agree, and policing compliance with fines. Meta Platforms Ireland - the operator of Facebook - challenged AGCOM's decision before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court, arguing the scheme breached both the directive and its freedom to do business. That court paused and asked Luxembourg whether the Italian model could stand. The answer, in essence: yes.

"Developments in digital technologies have drastically reshaped the media industry," the Court noted, pointing to a "sharp drop in publishers' revenues" that is "jeopardising their business model and undermining their crucial role in democratic societies".

Why it resonates beyond Italy

The judgment is a reference ruling, which means it does not settle the Italian case outright - that goes back to the Lazio court - but it binds every national court facing the same question. For the dozen-plus member states that built press-publisher rights into law after 2019, including Luxembourg, the message is that an enforcement regime with teeth can survive contact with EU law.

Publishers and journalists' groups read it as vindication. Maja Sever, president of the European Federation of Journalists, said the decision "reinforces a simple principle: journalistic work cannot simply be stolen, reused and monetised by large technology companies without authorisation, transparency and fair remuneration". The European Publishers Council called it a "massive victory for the financial sustainability of the free press". Yet the win belongs only partly to publishers, Sever cautioned: "journalists themselves, and not only publishers, must benefit from remuneration mechanisms".

Part of a wider reckoning

The Luxembourg ruling lands inside a decade-long, worldwide effort to make digital platforms pay for the journalism they carry - and it shows how differently the experiments are built. France was the first EU state to wield the 2019 directive's press-publisher right, and its competition authority went on to fine Google 500 million euros in 2021 for dragging its feet before deals were struck with French newspapers and agencies. Australia took a competition route rather than a copyright one, passing a 2021 bargaining code that pushed Google and Meta into licensing payments. Canada's 2023 Online News Act produced the opposite reflex: rather than pay, Meta switched news off across Facebook and Instagram. Italy's design splits the difference - it channels the fight through a regulator - and the Court has now certified that model as lawful. For publishers in Berlin, Madrid or Luxembourg, that certification is the part that travels.

The view from Kirchberg

There is a quiet local irony in where this landed. The Court that handed Europe's publishers their template sits on the Kirchberg plateau in Luxembourg, a short walk from the institutions that drafted the 2019 directive in the first place. Luxembourg wrote the same press-publisher right into its own copyright law in 2022, which means the principle the Court has now endorsed applies as much to the Grand Duchy's small, multilingual press as to Italy's. What happens next is procedural - the Lazio court must apply the ruling - but the direction of travel across the continent is now hard to mistake.