LONDON—Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, submitted a legal challenge calling into question Ofcom's power to levy fines that the tech giant considers exceedingly heavy on firms that are penalized for violating the United Kingdom's sweeping Online Safety Act. A hearing was held on Thursday.
Attorneys representing Meta, which also owns the messaging app WhatsApp and the Oculus virtual reality ecosystem, filed suit in the London High Court, a high-profile venue for civil cases in England and Wales. Reuters reports that Meta takes issue with how Ofcom levies fees and fines in enforcement matters.
Any ruling in such a case could have a broad impact on the adult entertainment industry and online pornography platforms that are subject to Ofcom's law enforcement purview due to the Online Safety Act, passed in 2023. The law permits Ofcom to enforce tougher online safety standards on large platforms, including porn sites and search engines.
Those levies include fining companies up to 10 percent of qualifying global revenue and costs, with the recovery of expenditure from enforcement.
"We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they're being regulated in," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
Lawyers representing Ofcom maintain the agency is not concerned over Meta's challenge to its enforcement measures and promised in court today that the company will be invoiced in the third quarter of 2026 for fees and penalties tallied after Meta neglected to pay fees based on the "qualifying worldwide revenue" it earns.
"Disappointingly, Meta are objecting to the payment of fees, and any penalties that could be levied on companies in future, that are calculated on this basis," explained the Ofcom spokesperson in the same report. Meta maintains that "qualifying worldwide revenue" is an abstract term and lacks a narrow definition.
Regulations indicate that worldwide revenue accounts for revenues generated from higher-scrutiny web services that could expose minors to content that is age-restricted and "legal but harmful," as is a standard trope used to pass the Online Safety Act.
Meta's social network businesses are, therefore, subject to fines based on income generated from those web services on a global scale. But Meta argued before the High Court that such power is steep and would "allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in U.K. corporate history."
Meta also explained in filings that this enforcement by Ofcom will impact "a small number of companies will be disproportionately impacted," with only about five large technology companies, all U.S.-based, that will shoulder 91 percent of the overall fees.
It is worth noting that Ofcom uses qualifying worldwide revenue standards to charge web platforms and their companies to fund the regulator's annual operations. Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom's costs in enforcing online safety regulations must be funded by the companies it regulates. Those fees have yielded tens of billions of dollars, reports suggest.
While Ofcom hasn't levied fines in this particular case, Meta takes issue with the potential cost related to fees and fines to ensure compliance with the digital regulator.
Lawrence Walters, an attorney who represents adult industry clientele, spoke to AVN about the potential implications of this legal challenge on global adult platforms. He said, "This is a welcome pushback against extraterritorial overreach by Ofcom. Many adult platforms operate with revenues that are substantial but far smaller than Big Tech’s.
"A global-revenue-based penalty regime can feel punitive and disconnected from the actual U.K. risk or user base," Walters argued. "If Meta succeeds in narrowing the penalties to U.K.-linked revenue, it could set a precedent that benefits mid-sized adult operators who might otherwise face existential fines for technical or interpretive breaches."
He added, "The challenge also highlights the blunt instrument nature of the Online Safety Act, which sweeps in adult content platforms providers alongside social media giants under similar high-stakes enforcement. Adult content is explicitly targeted, yet the penalty structure does not meaningfully differentiate between a platform whose core business is consensual adult entertainment for verified adults and one whose algorithms push harmful material to minors."
