Meta and TikTok have taken their complaints about a European Union digital supervision fee to the bloc’s General Court, accusing the European Commission of using flawed and opaque methods to calculate their financial obligations.
At the heart of the issue is a supervisory fee introduced under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in 2022.
The law requires major online platforms, 19 in total, including Meta, TikTok, Google, and Amazon, to pay 0.05% of their global net income.
The money funds the European Commission’s monitoring of platform compliance with the DSA’s rules. But how the Commission arrived at each company’s bill is now under investigation.
Meta’s counsel, Assimakis Komninos, made it clear that the issue wasn’t about dodging regulation but about the logic, or lack thereof, behind the numbers.
“The provisions in the Digital Services Act, or DSA, 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,” he told the five-judge panel in Luxembourg.
He objected the Commission’s choice to base the fee on the parent company’s revenue rather than that of the local subsidiary, a move he said distorted the true financial footprint of the entity being regulated. “Meta still does not know how the fee was calculated,” Komninos said.
Represented by lawyer Bill Batchelor, TikTok rejected the entire fee structure as inaccurate and discriminatory. “What has happened here is anything but fair or proportionate. The fee has used inaccurate figures and discriminatory methods,” Batchelor told the court.
According to him, TikTok’s supervisory fee was unfairly inflated by a method that counts the same users twice, once for using mobile, and again for desktop.
“It inflates TikTok’s fees, requires it to pay, not just for itself, but for other platforms and disregards the excessive fee cap,” he argued. He also accused the Commission of overreaching by basing the cap on group-wide profits instead of earnings by the regulated unit.
In response, the Commission stood its ground. Lawyer Lorna Armati argued that the financial strength of a group cannot be divorced from the regulatory burden of its platforms.
“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 told the court.
Armati insisted that the process was legally sound and transparent enough for companies to understand. “The providers had sufficient information to understand why and how the Commission used the numbers that it did and there is no question of any breach of their right to be heard now, unequal treatment.”
The court is expected to rule in 2026 and the result would impact how the EU funds regulatory enforcement, and determine whether Big Tech continues to foot the bill under current terms.
If Meta and TikTok succeed, it might force the Commission back to the drawing board, possibly lightening the financial load for other global platforms doing business in Europe.
The cases are officially registered as T-55/24 Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission and T-58/24 TikTok Technology v Commission.
