The first invoices arrive in September. Meta wants the basis changed before they do.
Meta has filed a judicial review against Ofcom over the way the regulator calculates fees and penalties under the UK’s Online Safety Act, the High Court was told on Thursday.
The dispute is narrow on its surface and substantial underneath. Ofcom’s methodology bills platforms based on what it calls qualifying worldwide revenue, the global income tied to a regulated service rather than just the UK slice.
Fines work the same way and can reach 10% of that worldwide figure. Meta’s position, restated outside court, is that any levy should reflect the country in which the service is regulated.
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“We and others in the tech industry believe (Ofcom’s) decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a Meta spokesperson told reporters. “
We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”
Ofcom said the framework was set out in the legislation Parliament passed and that it had consulted at length on how to apply it. “Disappointingly, Meta is objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in the future, that are calculated on this basis,” the regulator said.
What is actually at stake
The fees themselves are not large in Meta’s terms. Ofcom has signalled the levy will fall between 0.02% and 0.03% of qualifying worldwide revenue, with a £250m revenue threshold for liability and a £10m UK-revenue floor below which providers are exempt. For Meta, that translates to a few tens of millions of pounds a year on a roughly $165bn revenue base.
The penalty exposure is the larger number. The Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine in-scope services up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, the same multiplier the GDPR uses. On Meta’s 2025 figures, the theoretical ceiling sits in the $16bn range. Whether the calculation starts from worldwide or UK-only revenue makes the difference between a remedy that hurts and one that does not.
Ofcom’s lawyer, Javan Herberg, told the court the regulator intends to issue the first round of invoices in the third quarter of this year, most likely September. If Meta wins, refunds may follow. That timetable explains the urgency: a methodology fight after invoicing would mean clawing back money already paid.
Meta’s challenge is procedural rather than constitutional. The company is not arguing the Online Safety Act itself is unlawful. It is arguing that Ofcom’s interpretation of “qualifying worldwide revenue” reaches further than Parliament intended and that the resulting calculation is disproportionate within the meaning of public-law principles.
That framing rhymes with the proportionality fight Meta is also running with Brussels, where Meta has argued the Commission’s interpretation of the Digital Markets Act exceeds what the text supports.
The High Court will not rule on the merits at this stage. Thursday’s hearing covered timing, refund mechanics and the procedural shape of the review. A substantive judgment is unlikely before the autumn, by which time Ofcom will already have issued the first invoices.
If Ofcom prevails, the methodology stands and the UK regime joins the EU’s GDPR and DSA in calibrating penalties to global revenue. If Meta prevails, Ofcom will have to recalibrate; the implications would also extend to TikTok, X, Snap, Pinterest and the other large platforms in scope, none of which has yet joined Meta’s filing publicly but most of which are believed to share the underlying objection.
Meta’s relationship with British and European regulators has been litigious for some time. Meta has now amassed more than €2.5bn in EU fines, more than half the cumulative GDPR penalties levied across the bloc, and the company has appealed most of them. Ofcom’s Telegram CSAM probe is one of several ongoing Online Safety Act investigations into large platforms, alongside Ofcom’s letters in March demanding evidence of further child-safety improvements from Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
The judicial review lands in a moment when the Online Safety Act regime is moving from set-up to enforcement. Ofcom fined 4chan £520,000 in March and AVS Group £1.05m in December for age-check failings. The questions Meta is raising about how the meter is read are exactly the ones the next round of cases will turn on, and they sit alongside longstanding critique of the Online Safety Act from civil-society groups who argue the law’s scope is already too wide.
September will tell whether the company has bought itself a refund mechanism, a methodology change or simply a footnote in the first OSA bill of its life.
