Hot off the press from Reuters: Meta, a social media giant not historically known for getting confrontational with European regulators, is suing Ofcom over its fees and penalties regime – in the UK.
It’s difficult to know the details about the litigation as, unlike in the United States, court filings in the UK are not generally publicly available by default.
Explaining the context of this story from a standing start for readers who might not be familiar with the full backstory.
The UK has a communications regulator, the “Office of Communications,” which refers to itself by the Orwellian portmanteau “Ofcom.” Ofcom is not funded directly by the British government, but by the companies it regulates, in accordance with statutory powers granted it by the British government.
Traditionally, this means that, e.g., Ofcom’s broadcast regulatory functions were funded by UK-based television stations. Ofcom was granted powers to regulate the Internet when Parliament enacted the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act 2023, in which Ofcom was granted powers to impose duties on companies from all over the world if their Internet services were accessible in the UK – meaning that, in practice, Ofcom would be able to charge U.S. companies whose services were accessible in the UK.
The threshold at which these fees become chargeable is based on “Qualifying Worldwide Revenue” or QWR and is decided by the Secretary of State for DSIT, currently Liz Kendall MP, in consultation with Ofcom. That level was set at £250 million in November 2025, with an exemption for companies with less than £10 million relating to the UK, with the statutory regime governing so-called “fees duties” – the obligation to pay the amount – kicking in the following month, in December. Ofcom estimates that the fees it will charge to companies satisfying these criteria will be between 0.02 and 0.03% of QWR.
Ofcom determines the precise percentage by working backwards from reported revenue numbers from the companies it regulates, estimating how much money it will need to fund its budget, and then targeting as closely as possible the percentage fee to fund its operating budget.
QWR is also used to calculate the size of any penalty issued under the Online Safety Act regime, with Ofcom empowered by statute to issue fines of up to £18 million or 10% of QWR – whichever is greater.
For a company like Meta (2025 annual revenue: $200 billion) that means Ofcom can tithe the company potentially enormous amounts under the “fees duties” annually, depending on the precise calculation employed – and possibly up to $20 billion for any violations of the Act.
As Ofcom and the Online Safety Act regulate “user to user services” and search engines – both categories of service that are exclusively concerned with the acts of receiving and imparting information to and from the public – what this is, in effect, is a tax on speech and publication.
The lesson for American political observers, however, is this: in addition to Ofcom’s vast censorship powers, Ofcom purports to have the power to impose speech taxes on American companies for nothing more than being in the business of constitutionally protected conduct.
If describing this fees regime as “speech taxes” catches on, as it should, I expect Ofcom will protest by telling us that this is a “regulatory levy” or “cost recovery” or some similarly anodyne descriptor. I will preemptively respond to that by pointing out that Ofcom imposes this levy exclusively on, mainly American, companies engaged in expressive activity, calibrated to their global revenue from that expressive activity, used to fund a British censorship regulator.
In the 4chan litigation against Ofcom in the D.D.C., we drew the Court’s attention to Ofcom’s fees too, arguing that the fee structures are, for the purposes of American law, commercial activity as they seek to substitute content moderation services that, in the United States, can only be supplied by private actors.
The simple fact is that the Ofcom Fees Duties are expressed to be binding, they are a functional burden on American speech, and they are imposed for the purpose of funding an official censor.
The Ofcom Fees Duties are a British censorship tax on American speech, no matter what language Ofcom chooses to dress it up in. In the United States, those are unconstitutional. See Grosjean v. American Press Co. or Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue.
On account of my inability to see these filings due to their, at least for now, nonpublic nature, it is difficult to know the precise grounds on which Meta is challenging the rules; because the determination was made by the Secretary of State in conjunction with Ofcom, that decision is susceptible to judicial review in the UK. The pleadings probably deal with procedural defects, Wednesbury unreasonableness or some other boring UK administrative law stuff, not broad free speech issues. Reporting on the topic indicates, in particular, that Meta is objecting to the QWR being calculated on a groupwide basis for all its services rather than a per-application basis.
My hunch, based on very limited information, is that Meta has an uphill battle ahead of it. The deck is stacked fairly heavily against Meta, keeping in mind that the Online Safety Act 2023 was designed to render the First Amendment a dead letter online, and granted Ofcom vast powers to carry out that mission. Wikipedia learned this lesson the hard way in its High Court defeat last year. My guess is that Meta calculated the EV of a challenge to the rule and figured it was worth it to have a crack. The outcome, if successful, would be the reduction of fee liability, not its elimination.
Americans shouldn’t be paying fees to foreign censors in order to exercise our constitutional rights. We should be able to vindicate our First Amendment rights – and oppose any attempt to tax American speech – in an American court.
The GRANITE Act shield law proposal for Wyoming was designed to shield Wyoming’s citizens and companies from these fees, and to serve as a deterrent to any threats a foreign censor like Ofcom might wish to attempt in order to compel payment.
Congress should protect Americans from this intrusion on our civil rights by introducing a federal GRANITE Act (or legislative equivalent by another name) as soon as possible.