As companies fought digital authorities in Europe's second highest court, Meta Platforms and TikTok said a supervisory charge imposed by the European Union was excessive and based on a defective methodology.
The average monthly active user count for each business and whether or not the business reported a profit or loss in the previous fiscal year determine how much the annual charge is.
Although Meta told justices at the General Court that it was not attempting to evade paying its fair part of the fee, it questioned the Commission's methodology, claiming that the tax had been determined using the group's revenue rather than the subsidiary's.
Assimakis Komninos, Meta's attorney, said the five-judge panel that the corporation was still unsure about the fee's calculation.
TikTok, a Chinese online social media network owned by ByteDance, received similar criticism.
"What has happened here is anything but fair or proportionate. The fee has used inaccurate figures and discriminatory methods," TikTok lawyer Bill Batchelor told the court.
"It inflates TikTok's fees, requires it to pay, not just for itself, but for other platforms and disregards the excessive fee cap," he said.
He said that the Commission was discriminatory in counting the companies' users twice since it would count users twice if they switched between their laptops and mobile phones.
Additionally, he said that by capping fees at group profits, regulators had overreached their legal authority.
"When a group has consolidated accounts, it is the financial resources of the group as a whole that are available to that provider in order to bear the burden of the fee," she told the court.
"The providers had sufficient information to understand why and how the Commission used the numbers that it did and there is no question of any breach of their right to be heard now, unequal treatment," she said.
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The Commission's use of group profit as a reference value to determine the supervision charge was supported by attorney Lorna Armati, who dismissed the objections of both corporations.