Meta must negotiate with the press: the courts reopen the battle

According to Le Monde, the Paris court of appeal has confirmed that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, must "negotiate in good faith" with press titles over neighbouring rights. The group has not paid for the reuse of news content since the beginning of 2025. The daily describes it as a round won by the publishers. What the ruling precisely requires, the sums at stake, the timetable, Meta's reaction: the news agency dispatch does not say, and we will not invent it.

Everything that follows is therefore our reading, not established fact.

First, the vocabulary. "Negotiate in good faith": the phrase has the air of a mediation session between reasonable people. It presumes two parties roughly equal, seated on either side of a table, and a court politely reminding them of the rules of courtesy. Yet one of the parties owns the pipes, the audience and the timetable; the other owns newsrooms. When the stronger party stops paying, then agrees to talk under judicial compulsion, we are not really talking about an exchange between peers.

This is where Gramsci is useful. The notion of hegemony describes a domination that rests as much on consent as on force: an order becomes "common sense" when it seems normal to everyone. That information circulates first through private platforms, that newspapers must be present there to exist, that their content is a free raw material: this is a well-settled common sense. It took legal proceedings for anyone to wonder whether it should be paid for.

Yet we must keep a sense of proportion. A court of appeal ruling is not a revolution, and publishers are not insurgents: they are businesses defending their revenues, which is their right. The trap would be to confuse the defence of an economic model with the defence of the public's right to information. In the war of position that Gramsci describes, the trenches are the institutions that manufacture ideas; whoever owns them largely decides what seems reasonable. Here, however, both camps are owners. Journalists, for their part, are mentioned in the dispatch only through their employers.

Marxist tradition, moreover, reminds us that those who control the means of material production often also control the means of mental production. Meta's algorithms are one of the most powerful cultural production chains ever built, and the idea that its owner could decide alone on the visibility and price of news is precisely what a successful ideology makes self-evident. Neighbouring rights dent that self-evidence without overturning it.

What remains to be seen is what the negotiation will produce: remuneration that goes to newsrooms and journalists, or a new contract of dependence between titles and platform. The courts have opened the door; they have not said who will walk through it in a position of strength.