Meta filed a judicial review against Ofcom in London’s High Court on Thursday over how the regulator calculates fees and fines under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s online censorship law. The company isn’t challenging the law’s censorship powers, its ability to compel scanning of encrypted messages, or its elastic definition of online “harm.” It is challenging the size of the fine.
The dispute centers on whether Ofcom should base penalties on Meta’s global revenue or just what it earns in the UK and the gap between those two figures is enormous. Meta reported roughly $201 billion in worldwide revenue last year, and the Online Safety Act lets Ofcom fine companies up to 10% of “qualifying worldwide revenue,” which puts Meta’s theoretical penalty ceiling near $20 billion. Calculated on UK-only revenue, that number collapses.
“We and others in the tech industry believe [Ofcom’s] decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”
Ofcom pushed back in a statement, saying: “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.”
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Trade body CCIA and Epic Games may also seek to intervene, with Matthew Sinclair, CCIA UK Senior Director, saying in a statement: “CCIA supports Meta’s challenge and intends to apply to intervene in order to assist the court in understanding the wider potential impact on the sector.” Ofcom plans to send the first invoices in September and a full hearing is expected in October.
What makes Meta’s challenge so revealing is what it concedes. As far as we can tell, the company accepts the Online Safety Act and its power to curb American speech, despite the First Amendment. It accepts Ofcom’s authority to regulate speech, to investigate platforms, and to punish them. It’s asking for a smaller bill, not a different regime.
Compare that to what the smallest platforms are doing.
4chan and Kiwi Farms, two US-based forums with no offices, employees, or servers in the UK, have refused to comply with the Online Safety Act entirely. When Ofcom fined 4chan £520,000 for failing to implement age checks and conduct risk assessments, the platform’s lawyer, Preston Byrne, responded by posting an AI-generated image of a hamster.
“In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment,” Byrne wrote.
4chan has not paid a penny of its accumulated fines and both it and Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit against Ofcom in US federal court in August 2025, arguing that the regulator’s enforcement demands amount to unconstitutional foreign censorship on American soil. Their lawyers called Ofcom’s actions “egregious violations of Americans’ civil rights” and pointed out that every enforcement demand was sent by email, bypassing the UK-US Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty entirely.
A FOI request revealed that Ofcom had issued 197 Section 100 notices to US-based companies as of February 2026, all without using MLAT. Only four American companies, 4chan, Kiwi Farms, Gab, and a mental health forum called SaSu, publicly refused to comply.
Byrne called the 197 notices a “breathtaking” “attack on the First Amendment” and noted that Ofcom appeared to be enjoying a 98% compliance rate with demands that he argues have no legal force in the United States. The vast majority of American companies that received Ofcom’s demands appear to have quietly done what they were told.
The contrast between these approaches could not be sharper. Smaller platforms with limited resources are challenging the Online Safety Act’s legitimacy in federal court, fighting over whether a British regulator has any right to dictate what speech is allowed on American servers.
Meta, a company that earned $201 billion last year and has spent years battling EU regulators through every available legal channel, does not challenge the entire censorship framework and is only negotiating over the accounting method used to calculate its contribution.
The UK government has built a system where companies pay for the privilege of being censored, with the size of the payment scaled to how much money they make from publishing the speech that Ofcom regulates.
Meta is the company that could most easily challenge the Online Safety Act’s surveillance and censorship powers, including the ability to compel scanning of encrypted messages that Signal has said would drive it out of the UK entirely. Yet, it is asking the High Court to please use a different revenue column when working out the fee. The censorship apparatus the Online Safety Act built, and the speech tax that funds it, remains unchallenged by the very companies with the deepest pockets and the most to lose.
