Luxembourg, September 10, 2025 – The General Court (GC) has annulled European Commission (EC) decisions that set supervisory fees for Meta and TikTok under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), but allowed the effects of those rulings to remain in place on a provisional basis.
The DSA regulates online intermediaries and platforms such as marketplaces, social networks, content-sharing platforms, app stores, and online travel and accommodation platforms. In April 2023, the EC designated Meta and TikTok as very large online platforms under the DSA.
To cover the cost of supervising these platforms, the EC imposed an annual fee through implementing decisions in March that year. For the purposes of determining the fee amount, the EC relied on two third-party operators, SensorTower and Similarweb, in order to calculate the number of average monthly active recipients (AMAR) in the EU and to divide between them the overall amount of the annual supervisory fee.
Both Meta Platforms Ireland and TikTok Technology, in their challenges before the first-instance court in February 2024, contested the methodology used for fixing the annual fee, among other things.
The judges found that while the methodology used to calculate the average monthly active users, essentially a common methodology used for the fee-setting process, was adopted incorrectly through implementing decisions rather than a delegated act, as required under the DSA.
As a result, the court annulled the EC fee decisions but temporarily upheld their effects to avoid disrupting the supervisory system. The Brussels-based agency now has up to 12 months to correct the methodology and reissue new fee decisions in line with DSA requirements.
Source: https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2025-09/cp250114en.pdf
