Meta Platforms Inc & Ors v Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen

This case sits at the intersection of competition law, digital business models and user data. The claim against Meta says Facebook users were required to accept broad data collection terms if they wanted to use the service. That included not just activity on Facebook itself, but also activity on other websites and apps.

The core complaint was simple in commercial terms: Meta allegedly obtained valuable off-Facebook data from users, used it to support advertising revenue, and gave users no payment or fair compensation for that extra value. The class representative said Meta could do this because of its dominant position in the personal social network market.

Meta challenged the certification ruling on two main grounds. First, it said the class representative's unfair pricing theory was legally wrong. Meta argued that any competition-law assessment of unfair price had to compare the entire value of the Facebook service with the entire price paid by users. In Meta's view, the claim wrongly focused only on the extra off-Facebook data and ignored the value users received from Facebook as a whole.

Second, Meta said there was a gap in the claim on causation. It argued there was no proper link between the alleged take-it-or-leave-it condition and any compensatory loss said to have been suffered by users.

The Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal. Its main point was that the Competition Appeal Tribunal had not even arguably made an error of law in certifying the amended claim. The court treated the dispute as one about whether the claim was arguable and manageable, not whether the allegations had already been proved.

On the unfair price issue, the court said Meta had framed the point as a pure question of law, but in substance it was about how the evidence and the theory of harm were characterised. The tribunal was entitled to read the claim as using an incremental, temporal analysis that compared the position before and after the introduction of off-Facebook data collection.

The biggest practical lesson is that a digital service can face competition scrutiny even where users do not pay cash. In the court's discussion, data can be treated as part of the economic exchange. That matters for ad-funded platforms, apps and online services that rely on tracking, profiling or combining data from multiple sources.

The second lesson is about market power and user choice. The claim focused heavily on take-it-or-leave-it terms, opaque conditions and limited practical ability to opt out. If a business has a strong position in its market, those design choices may be looked at not just through privacy law, but also through competition law.

If your business runs a platform, app or ad-supported website, use this case as a practical review prompt. The issue is not only whether your privacy notice exists. It is whether the overall bargain with users is understandable, defensible and commercially fair in context.

That is especially important if your service has strong network effects, limited substitutes for users, or a business model that depends on combining data from on-platform and off-platform behaviour.

This decision does not create a new rule that every data-heavy business is acting unlawfully. The risk is sharper where several features appear together: a strong market position, a service users feel they must have, broad data extraction, weak practical choice, and a clear commercial gain from the extra data.

The court also accepted that competition law in digital markets is still developing. That means businesses should avoid overconfidence based on older pricing models that assume only money counts as consideration. In some settings, data, attention and behavioural information may all matter to the legal analysis.