The case in brief
On 13 and 14 October 2026, Meta is challenging Ofcom in a judicial review at the English High Court. The dispute concerns how Ofcom defines "qualifying worldwide revenue" (QWR) under the Online Safety Act. QWR drives both the annual fees paid by large providers and the ceiling on penalties. According to City AM, firms in breach can be fined up to 10% of QWR or £18m, whichever is higher.
The mechanics matter. City AM reports that where Ofcom enforces against a single entity, such as one social media platform, the penalty base is that entity's revenue. Where it proceeds against a parent and subsidiaries, it can use the group's total revenue, including unregulated activities such as enterprise software. Meta's filings, as reported, say the Act gives Ofcom no power to include non-regulated revenue when pursuing multiple entities. They call the approach "double counting" and say it creates penalties at an "unprecedented level of magnitude."
The strongest case for Ofcom
Ofcom's position deserves a fair hearing. Fines only deter if they are large relative to what a company earns. A penalty pegged to one subsidiary's revenue can be sidestepped by moving revenue around a corporate group, and a cap that a multinational can treat as a rounding error does not change behaviour. Ofcom also says the QWR regulations set the methodology for the maximum penalty, not the penalty itself, and that it decides an appropriate and proportionate sum in each case. It says it struck "a careful balance" and that Parliament tasked it with regulating an industry that had been unaccountable for more than 20 years. On the fee side, the government's own rationale is that companies earning revenue from online services should cover the cost of regulating them. The Secretary of State's letter to Ofcom, dated 18 November 2025, says exactly that.
Where the argument gets harder for Ofcom
The difficulty is the gap between the regulated activity and the revenue base. Ofcom's own fees guidance defines QWR as "the worldwide revenues arising in connection with the relevant parts of regulated services." Providers must aggregate revenue from those relevant parts. On that definition, the revenue base is tied to regulated services. If the penalty ceiling for a group can also sweep in revenue from products the Act never touches, Meta has a coherent argument that the measure has drifted from the statutory concept.
This is a question about limits on delegated power, not about whether platforms should be regulated. Those limits matter for anyone who builds services in the UK. A maximum penalty keyed to unrelated business lines means the regulatory risk of operating a small, regulated service depends on what else the parent company happens to sell. Investors and founders price that exposure, and it is hardest to absorb for mid-sized firms that sit inside larger groups.
The fee side is a separate and more modest issue
It would be wrong to treat the fees and the fines as one problem. The fee regime is deliberately narrow. The threshold is £250m of QWR, and providers with UK referable revenue below £10m are exempt, a carve-out the government said is meant to encourage companies to enter the UK market. Ofcom has given an indicative tariff of 0.02 to 0.03% of QWR, and it says over 40 providers submitted fee notifications for 2026/27.
Meta's complaint on fees, voiced by its counsel Monica Carss-Frisk KC, is distributional. As reported by Anadolu via the Express Tribune, she called Ofcom's approach "troubling" and said it leaves "a handful of companies such as Meta" bearing most of Ofcom's costs. A fee system that charges only the largest companies is easy to defend politically. It is also a system in which the paying class has little leverage, which is why a court testing the definition is a legitimate check rather than an obstruction.
Why a proportionality ruling matters beyond Meta
Ofcom's director for online safety, Oliver Griffiths, told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee on 15 September that the regulator operates in a "highly litigious environment." City AM reports that Meta has brought two sets of proceedings over the fee calculation, that other providers have brought similar claims, and that several services have brought judicial reviews over Ofcom's data-gathering. Litigation is not evidence of bad faith by either side. New statutory regimes routinely produce test cases, and judicial review is the mechanism through which courts fix the boundary of what a regulator may do.
Our view is that a proportionate regime should do three things. It should keep the deterrent real, which means meaningful ceilings for the largest firms. It should tie the penalty base to the harm-bearing service, or to a clearly legislated group-level rule, rather than leave it to regulatory construction. And it should publish the factors Ofcom will use to move from a maximum to an actual penalty, because "we will be proportionate" is a promise rather than a rule. A ceiling Ofcom says it will rarely approach still shapes settlement negotiations and compliance spending, because firms plan against the ceiling and not against the regulator's stated intentions.
What to watch
The judgment will turn on statutory interpretation: whether the Act's concept of revenue admits group-wide, unregulated income when more than one entity is pursued. If Meta wins, Parliament or the government may need to clarify the group-revenue rule, which would be a cleaner outcome than years of uncertainty. If Ofcom wins, the burden shifts to Ofcom to show, case by case, that the penalties it actually imposes are proportionate. Either result will tell other platforms, domestic and foreign, how much of their business the UK safety regime can reach.
Note: this analysis relies on the filings and statements as reported by the press and on Ofcom and government pages; we have not seen the court documents themselves.