Meta has asked the High Court in London to limit how Ofcom calculates online safety fees and maximum fines, according to Courthouse News.
The hearing ended late on Wednesday after a day and a half of arguments. The case concerns Ofcom's use of worldwide revenue as the yardstick, not a specific fine. Meta is contesting the method before any penalty has been set.
That timing is the interesting part. Ofcom is the regulator that enforces the Online Safety Act, and the revenue base it uses determines how large a fee or maximum fine can get. Fighting over the formula now, rather than appealing a penalty later, lets a company argue about the ceiling in the abstract.
The approach has a familiar cousin. The EU's GDPR privacy law also ties its top fines to a percentage of global annual turnover, so the biggest companies face the largest caps. Counting worldwide income makes a penalty hard to shrug off. It also invites the obvious objection: a UK rule is reaching for money earned far outside the UK.
So the dispute reads as statute versus proportionality. One question is what the wording of the Act allows Ofcom to count. The other is whether counting it that way is a fair measure of what a platform owes for its conduct in Britain. A ruling on either would apply to every service the Act covers, not just Meta.