// content access

Source: Search Engine Journal

Meta has built an asymmetric position in AI training by vacuuming up web content at scale while publishers focus their licensing demands on Google, which actually negotiates and pays for data access. This creates perverse incentives where the company taking less friction from publishers gains the most training material, while Google—despite being the bigger negotiating target—faces rising compliance costs that Meta sidesteps entirely. Publishers may eventually recognize that Meta's free-riding extracts more value than Google's paid agreements, but regulatory and market pressure has so far landed on the wrong actor.