On "Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites"

Meta's backpedal on scraping language is less a victory for publishers and more a masterclass in having your cake anyway—they're just removing the explicit legal permission slip while their crawlers keep running. The real play here is rhetorical: kill the offensive terms, take the PR win, and let engineers argue later that scraping unlicensed content was always incidental to their AI training pipeline. For publishers betting on contractual protection, this is a reminder that terms of service are theater when the company still controls the infrastructure. What actually matters now is whether anyone enforces robots.txt or whether legal cases actually stick—the wording change solves neither.