By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Meta (NASDAQ:META) Platforms has challenged a supervisory fee amounting to 0.05% of its annual worldwide net income aimed at covering EU regulators' costs of monitoring compliance with new European Union rules requiring it to do more to police content.
The European Commission has said the Digital Services Act (DSA) levy applies to 20 very large online platforms, including Meta, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and TikTok and two very large online search engines.
The size of the annual fee is related to the number of average monthly active users for each company and whether it posts a profit or loss in the preceding financial year.
Meta said it disagreed with the methodology used to calculate the fees.
"Currently, companies that record a loss don't have to pay, even if they have a large user base or represent a greater regulatory burden, which means some companies pay nothing, leaving others to pay a disproportionate amount of the total," a Meta spokesperson said.
The company has challenged the levy at the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe's second-highest. Politico was the first to report about Meta's move.