BRUSSELS : Meta Platforms and TikTok on Wednesday won their legal fight against a European Union supervisory fee imposed on them under landmark tech rules, after Europe’s second-highest court faulted EU regulators on the way they calculated the levy.
Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok sued the European Commission after they were hit with a supervisory fee of 0.05 per cent of their annual worldwide net income to cover the EU executive’s cost of monitoring their compliance with the Digital Services Act.
The size of the annual fee is tied to the number of average monthly active users for each company and whether each posts a profit or loss in the preceding financial year. The two companies said the methodology was flawed, resulting in disproportionate fees.
The Luxembourg-based General Court sided with Meta and TikTok, giving EU regulators 12 months to fix their methodology using a different legal act.
“That methodology… should have been adopted not in the context of implementing decisions but in a delegated act, in accordance with the rules laid down in the DSA,” judges said.
They said regulators need not repay the 2023 fees paid by the companies for now, while they come up with a new legal basis for the methodology used to determine the size of the fee.
The DSA, which entered into force in November 2022, requires very large online platforms to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their sites or risk fines as much as 6 per cent of their annual global turnover.
Other companies required to pay the supervisory fee include Amazon, Apple, Booking.com, Google, Microsoft, Elon Musk’s X social media platform, Snapchat and Pinterest.
The cases are T-55/24 – Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission and T-58/24 – TikTok Technology v Commission.
