KUALA LUMPUR – Meta and TikTok have taken their grievances over a supervisory fee imposed by the European Union to the bloc’s second-highest court, arguing that the levy is excessive and based on flawed calculations.
The companies appeared before the General Court on Wednesday to contest the charge, introduced under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large online platforms to pay up to 0.05% of their global annual net income to help cover the European Commission’s enforcement costs, Reuters reported.
The amount each company owes is determined by the number of monthly active users and their financial performance in the previous year.
Meta’s legal representative, Assimakis Komninos, stressed that the company was not trying to evade the charge but questioned the methodology behind it. He argued that the Commission calculated the fee based on the group’s global revenue rather than that of its Irish subsidiary.
“The provisions in the Digital Services Act… go against the letter and the spirit of the law, are totally untransparent with black boxes and have led to completely implausible and absurd results,” Komninos told the five-judge panel.
TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, echoed similar concerns.
“What has happened here is anything but fair or proportionate. The fee has used inaccurate figures and discriminatory methods,” said TikTok’s lawyer Bill Batchelor.
He alleged that the Commission had effectively charged TikTok for other platforms’ costs, inflated the company’s dues, and exceeded its legal remit by basing the cap on group profits rather than individual entities. He also claimed that users were being counted multiple times across devices.
The Commission’s lawyer, Lorna Armati, defended the use of consolidated group accounts in determining the fee, arguing that such figures accurately reflect a company’s capacity to contribute.
“When a group has consolidated accounts, it is the financial resources of the group as a whole that are available to that provider in order to bear the burden of the fee,” she said.
Armati maintained that the methodology was transparent and that companies had been given sufficient information to understand how the fee was determined.
A decision from the court is expected next year.
The cases are T-55/24 Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission and T-58/24 TikTok Technology v Commission. — June 11, 2025