The Court of Justice of the European Union last week delivered a Grand Chamber judgment in Case C-797/23, ruling that Italian legislation requiring online platforms to payfair compensation to press publishers is compatible with EU law. The decision, dated 12 May 2026, directly concerns Meta Platforms Ireland and its challenge to a regulatory framework established by the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority, known as AGCOM.

The ruling has immediate relevance for the advertising and digital media industries. It affirms that EU member states can go substantially further than the baseline rights set out in Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 - the so-called Digital Single Market Copyright Directive - when transposing those rights into national law. The decision does not end the underlying Italian case; it returns the matter to the Lazio Regional Administrative Court with binding interpretive guidance on what EU law permits.

The Italian framework under scrutiny

On 19 January 2023, AGCOM adopted Decision No 3/23/CONS, which established the benchmark criteria for determining fair compensation for the online use of press publications by information society service providers. The decision was issued under Article 43-bis of Italian Law No 633/1941, the Italian copyright statute as amended to implement Directive 2019/790.

The AGCOM decision defined a calculation basis using the advertising revenue that information society service providers generate from the online use of a publisher's press publications, after deducting the publisher's own revenue from redirecting traffic to its website. It set a rate of up to 70% to be applied to that basic amount, depending on a series of additional criteria. Penalties for non-compliance were capped at 1% of the non-compliant entity's turnover in the most recent financial year.

The Italian statute itself imposed a series of obligations on providers. They were required to enter into negotiations with publishers if they used or intended to use press publications, to refrain from limiting the visibility of publishers' content in search results during those negotiations, and to provide AGCOM and publishers with the data necessary to calculate fair compensation. Failure to provide such data within 30 days of a request triggered an administrative fine of up to 1% of annual turnover. Where no agreement on the amount of compensation was reached within 30 days of the request to open negotiations, either party could apply to AGCOM, which then had 60 days to indicate which financial proposals complied with its criteria, or to set fair compensation of its own motion.

Meta Platforms Ireland, best known as the operator of Facebook, brought an action before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court seeking the annulment of Decision No 3/23/CONS. Meta argued that Article 43-bis of Law No 633/1941 and the AGCOM decision were contrary to Article 15 of Directive 2019/790, which in its view establishes only exclusive rights - not a remuneration right - and does not authorise the kind of regulatory intervention AGCOM was given. Meta also challenged the measures on the grounds that they restricted the freedom to conduct a business, as guaranteed by Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

The Lazio court was uncertain whether those measures were compatible with EU law and referred three questions to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on 12 December 2023. The request was received in Luxembourg on 21 December 2023.

What the Court decided

The Court, sitting as a Grand Chamber composed of 13 judges including President K. Lenaerts and Vice-President T. von Danwitz, ruled in plain terms that Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 and Articles 16 and 52 of the Charter must be interpreted as not preventing national legislation that: confers on publishers of press publications the right to obtain fair remuneration in return for authorising their use by online platforms; obliges those platforms to negotiate with publishers, to avoid limiting publisher content visibility in search results during negotiations, and to supply the data needed to calculate remuneration; and empowers a public authority to define the criteria for that remuneration, to determine the amount in the absence of agreement, and to impose administrative penalties for non-compliance.

Three conditions attach to that compatibility. The legislation must not deprive publishers of the right to refuse authorisation or to grant it free of charge. It must not impose any payment obligation on platforms that do not use or intend to use press publications. And the obligations and penalties imposed must observe the principle of proportionality.

The ruling addresses a structural tension that had persisted since the directive came into force in 2019. Article 15 grants publishers exclusive rights of reproduction and making available to the public in respect of online uses by information society service providers. Those rights are, by their nature, preventive: any use requires prior consent from the rightholder. Italy went further by adding a compensation mechanism and a regulatory backstop. Meta argued that this transformed an exclusive right into a remuneration right, which would be incompatible with the directive because it removes the publisher's ability to prohibit use altogether.

The Court rejected that reading. According to the judgment, the protection conferred by Article 15 extends not just to the enjoyment of the rights it grants, but also to their effective exercise in practice. National legislatures enjoy discretion in specifying the detailed rules for implementing those rights, provided they do not alter the substantive law in terms of nature and scope. The Italian framework, properly interpreted, makes fair compensation the consideration for an authorisation that publishers remain free to grant, refuse, or offer without charge. It does not, on its face, strip publishers of the ability to withhold that authorisation.

The information asymmetry argument

One of the most practically significant passages of the judgment concerns data access. According to the Court, only information society service providers possess the information that enables the economic value of online use of press publications to be assessed - for example, revenues generated by or expected from such use. Publishers are therefore in a structurally weaker negotiating position when trying to determine what fair remuneration should look like.

The judgment states that the obligation to refrain from limiting the visibility of publications in search results during negotiations serves to prevent pressure being exerted on publishers or the economic value of the use of their press publications being concealed. Those are not peripheral observations. They go to the heart of why regulators and legislators in multiple EU member states have concluded that unassisted negotiations between platforms and publishers do not produce fair outcomes.

The Advocate General, M. Szpunar, delivered his opinion on 10 July 2025. He drew on the structural dynamics of the market at some length, noting that platforms harm publisher interests through a substitution effect - allowing users to read summaries of journalistic content without visiting the original source - while simultaneously creating a dependency because many readers access publisher content only through platform interfaces. Meta requested the reopening of the oral part of the procedure by document lodged on 22 July 2025. The Court declined, finding no new fact of a decisive nature had emerged. The Advocate General also observed that while large titles are more affected by the substitution effect, smaller publishers - particularly local ones - may in some cases benefit from the expansion effect by reaching audiences they could not have reached through traditional means.

Charter balance: business freedom versus press pluralism

The Court's analysis of the Charter dimensions is careful and technically detailed. Article 16 of the Charter protects the freedom to conduct a business, which covers the freedom to exercise an economic or commercial activity, freedom of contract, and free competition. The Court acknowledged that the obligations imposed by the Italian legislation - particularly the data-disclosure duty backed by fines and the search-visibility requirement - constitute a limitation on that freedom.

However, limitations on the freedom to conduct a business may be justified under Article 52(1) of the Charter if they are provided for by law, respect the essence of the rights concerned, are necessary, and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the EU. The Court found all four conditions satisfied. The obligations are set out in Law No 633/1941. They do not prevent platforms from conducting business entirely, they contribute to the objectives of Directive 2019/790, and they are not manifestly disproportionate.

The Court placed particular weight on the competing fundamental rights that the Italian measures seek to protect. Article 17(2) of the Charter covers the right to intellectual property. Article 11(2) covers the freedom and pluralism of the media. According to the judgment, Article 11 constitutes one of the essential foundations of a pluralist, democratic society and is one of the values on which the European Union is founded under Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. That is a strong statement of the weight those interests carry. The fine structure - capped at 1% of annual turnover - allows penalties to be calibrated to the financial capacity of the non-compliant operator, the Court found, and does not appear to place a manifestly unreasonable burden on it.

The Court also addressed the confidentiality of commercial data. Article 43-bis(12) of Law No 633/1941 expressly states that publishers of press publications must respect the confidentiality of commercial, industrial, and financial information of which they have become aware through the data-disclosure process. The judgment cited that provision as a factor supporting proportionality: the disclosure obligation is not simply a transfer of sensitive commercial data from platforms to competitors, but a mechanism for calculating compensation whose results are bounded by confidentiality requirements.

Scope and what it leaves open

The ruling has a defined but significant scope. It is a preliminary ruling under Article 267 TFEU, which means the Court interprets EU law but does not decide the underlying Italian dispute itself. The Lazio Regional Administrative Court must now apply the Court's guidance to the facts before it. Whether the Italian legislation as written actually satisfies all three conditions the Court identified - that publishers can still refuse, that platforms not using publications face no payment duty, and that proportionality is observed - is for the national court to verify.

The ruling also leaves open how the AGCOM criteria will operate in practice. The decision identifies advertising revenue generated from the online use of press publications as the calculation basis, with the publisher's traffic-redirection revenue deducted and a rate of up to 70% applied to the resulting amount. But the precise figures in any negotiation will depend on granular data that platforms have not historically shared with publishers. The data-disclosure obligation backed by AGCOM's enforcement powers was specifically designed to address that problem.

The Advocate General noted in his opinion that the market for press publishers' rights is one where those rights have been recently created and their market value has not yet been clearly determined. That observation points to the practical challenge ahead: the compensation framework exists, the Court has said it is lawful in principle, but the numbers still need to be negotiated or determined case by case under the AGCOM procedure.

The Court's third question from the national court was partially inadmissible. The Lazio court had referred to Article 109 TFEU as a source of a principle of free competition. The Court found that provision irrelevant - it governs EU institutions' powers over state aid, not member state transposition of copyright directives. The Court therefore addressed the competition-related arguments under the freedom to conduct a business framework in Article 16 of the Charter instead.

Implications beyond Italy

The judgment will be read carefully in other EU member states that have adopted or are considering similar measures. The Advocate General observed in his opinion that Italy is not the only member state to have gone beyond the mere assertion of exclusive rights for press publishers, citing Belgium, France, and Spain as examples. The Court implicitly endorsed that approach, finding that a degree of fragmentation between national implementation rules is inherent in the current state of EU copyright harmonisation.

For the marketing and advertising community, the practical implications run across several dimensions that PPC Land has tracked extensively. The calculation basis tied to advertising revenue generated by platform use of publisher content means that any compensation paid to publishers will be linked to the commercial value platforms derive from displaying that content. Where a platform's advertising revenue depends on attracting users through news content, the compensation obligation will be proportionately higher.

The ruling arrives as the broader question of how platforms compensate publishers for content use has become one of the defining tensions in digital media. Publishers have documented significant traffic losses as AI-powered features in search products answer user queries without requiring visits to original sources. The Italian mechanism deals with a narrower and older version of that problem - the display of press publications by information society service providers such as social networks - but the underlying structural issue is the same: publishers bear the cost of content production while platforms capture a disproportionate share of the resulting commercial value.

IAB Europe published a technical framework in September 2025 addressing publisher compensation for AI content ingestion, reflecting the same structural concern in a different technological context. According to that framework, referrals from AI platforms increased 357% year-over-year in June 2025, reaching 1.13 billion visits. The CJEU judgment provides legal architecture for regulatory compensation mechanisms that could inform how similar instruments are designed in the AI context, even though the Court's ruling technically concerns press publication rights under Directive 2019/790.

Italy's AGCOM has been active on multiple digital regulation fronts. PPC Land reported in January 2026 that the regulator imposed a EUR 14.2 million fine on Cloudflare for refusing to comply with content blocking orders under Italy's anti-piracy legislation, a penalty also calculated at 1% of global revenue. That enforcement action and this CJEU judgment both reflect an Italian regulatory posture that is willing to use administrative penalties at the limits of EU law to enforce digital content rules against non-compliant global platforms. Cloudflare subsequently appealed that fine in March 2026.

The compensation framework's direct reference to advertising revenue has specific relevance for the programmatic advertising industry. AGCOM's Decision No 3/23/CONS defines the calculation basis as the advertising revenue of information society service providers resulting from the online use of the publisher's press publications, after deduction of the publisher's revenue from redirecting traffic on its website. That definition requires platforms to attribute advertising revenue to specific content sources - a technically demanding exercise that depends on the kind of data platforms currently do not routinely share with publishers.

The data-disclosure obligation now upheld by the CJEU would compel platforms to provide that information. Publishers and collective management organisations may request it; AGCOM may also request it directly. Non-compliance triggers the 1% turnover fine. The Court found this mechanism proportionate precisely because publishers cannot calculate fair compensation without access to data only platforms hold. How platforms implement such attribution at a technical level - and what role programmatic infrastructure might play in that reporting - is a question the judgment leaves entirely to the parties and the regulator.

For advertisers and agencies, the downstream effects are uncertain but worth monitoring. If platforms are required to share advertising revenue data linked to specific publisher content and to pay publishers a share of it, the cost structure of running advertising on content aggregation services and social networks could shift over time. The judgment does not address that question, but it is one that media planning and procurement teams will need to track as the AGCOM process resumes.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Court of Justice of the European Union, Grand Chamber, ruled in proceedings between Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd and AGCOM. Intervening parties included the Federazione Italiana Editori Giornali (FIEG), the Societa italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), and Gedi Gruppo Editoriale SpA. The governments of Italy, Belgium, Denmark, France, and Poland, and the European Commission all submitted observations.

What: The Court ruled that EU law does not prevent national legislation that obliges online platforms to pay fair compensation to press publishers for the use of their publications, requires those platforms to negotiate in good faith, maintain the visibility of publisher content in search results during negotiations, and share the advertising revenue data needed to calculate compensation - all under the supervision of an independent regulator with the power to set benchmark criteria and impose administrative fines of up to 1% of annual turnover.

When: The judgment was delivered on 12 May 2026. The underlying AGCOM decision that Meta challenged was adopted on 19 January 2023. The preliminary ruling request was filed on 12 December 2023.

Where: The case originated in the Lazio Regional Administrative Court in Italy and was referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. The ruling's interpretation of EU law is binding across all member states.

Why: The case tests the limits of what member states may do when implementing Article 15 of the Digital Single Market Copyright Directive - specifically whether national regulators can impose data-disclosure duties, negotiation obligations, search-visibility requirements, and administrative penalties on platforms that use press publications online. The Court found all of those measures consistent with EU law, subject to publishers retaining the ability to refuse authorisation or grant it free of charge, and provided proportionality is respected. The ruling strengthens the legal foundation for similar publisher compensation mechanisms across the EU at a moment when the economic relationship between platforms and publishers is under sustained pressure.

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