A Meta Ruling That Reaches Every UK Platform

What the Court of Appeal actually decided

On 29 July 2026, three Court of Appeal judges - Lord Justice Green, giving the lead judgment, with Lord Justice Phillips and Lord Justice Zacaroli agreeing - dismissed an appeal by Meta Platforms Inc in Meta Platforms Inc v Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, [2026] EWCA Civ 993. The underlying case is an opt-out collective action brought under section 47B of the Competition Act 1998 before the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), on behalf of more than 46 million UK Facebook users. Dr Lovdahl Gormsen, the class representative, alleges that between 14 February 2016 and 16 October 2023 Meta abused a dominant position by making access to Facebook conditional on users accepting the collection of data about their activity away from the platform, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and without payment.

The CAT had already allowed Dr Lovdahl Gormsen to amend her claim to add a second damages theory, user damages, alongside the original claim for loss based on what Meta earned from the data. Meta appealed that permission. The Court of Appeal's ruling is narrow in one important sense: it decides only that user damages are a remedy the CAT is entitled to consider, not that Meta has done anything wrong. Liability, and whether user damages actually fit the facts of this case, will be decided at trial, currently listed for 2028.

The remedy Meta tried to rule out

User damages, sometimes called negotiating damages, are not compensation for a loss the claimant can show on a balance sheet. They are calculated as the fee a defendant would hypothetically have had to pay a claimant to obtain permission to do what it did. English courts have awarded them for decades in cases like trespass on land, breach of a restrictive covenant, and infringement of a patent or trade mark - situations where a defendant used something belonging to someone else without agreeing a price for it. The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in One Step (Support) Ltd v Morris-Garner reframed the underlying principle: the remedy is available wherever a defendant has effectively taken a valuable, controllable asset for nothing, not only in a fixed list of named torts.

Meta argued that competition law claims fall outside that principle because, unlike trespass or a patent, an abuse of dominance under section 18 of the Competition Act 1998 does not protect a property right, and pointed to older cases, Stoke-on-Trent City Council v W&J Wass Ltd and Devenish Nutrition Ltd v Sanofi-Aventis, that it said confined user damages to proprietary wrongs. The Court of Appeal disagreed on both counts.

Why the court said competition law fits

Lord Justice Green held that neither Wass nor Devenish actually establishes that user damages are closed off to non-proprietary claims, and that the categories identified in One Step were illustrative, not exhaustive. He noted that user damages are already available for breach of contract and for misuse of private information - the Court of Appeal's earlier reasoning in the Lloyd v Google line of cases treated personal data as capable of supporting exactly this kind of award - which undercut Meta's claim that the remedy needs a property right to attach to. He added that section 18 of the Competition Act, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position, is not on its face limited to protecting property, and that competition law is, in his words, 'a prime candidate' for a remedy designed to stop a defendant profiting from something it took without paying for it.

The court also rejected Meta's fallback argument that users had, in any event, consented to the data collection by accepting Facebook's terms. Lord Justice Green's judgment noted that consent obtained through take-it-or-leave-it terms, where the alternative is losing access to the service altogether, does not straightforwardly bar a claimant from arguing the terms were themselves the abuse. That question of substance, like liability itself, is left for trial.

The part that reaches beyond Facebook

Nothing in the Court of Appeal's reasoning is written to apply only to Meta or to personal data specifically. The test it endorsed is general: has a defendant taken a valuable, controllable asset without agreeing a price for it. That description fits a wide range of platform business models that run on inputs collected through standard-form, non-negotiated terms - user-generated content, product reviews, location or usage data, or activity logs used to train or improve a product - wherever the provider held enough market power for a competition claim to attach.

The structural change is what a UK collective claim now has to prove to reach a large number. Before this ruling, a claimant group generally had to show the class suffered an ascertainable financial loss, and price that loss, to size a damages claim. User damages let a claimant instead point to what a willing buyer would have paid for consent, a hypothetical negotiation the court can construct without asking whether any individual claimant was worse off. That is a lower evidential bar for reaching a large headline number, and it is available now, well before Meta's 2028 trial resolves whether it applies to this specific case, to any claimant lawyer assessing a new opt-out claim under section 47B against a platform with a comparable fact pattern.

What EU/UK platform operators should check now

Legal teams at platforms operating in the UK, not only Meta's direct competitors in social media, should treat this as a prompt to review three things. First, whether any current product depends on data, content or activity obtained through take-it-or-leave-it terms with no paid or negotiated alternative, since that is the fact pattern the ruling addresses most directly. Second, whether that input has an identifiable market comparator - a licence fee, a data-purchase price, a paid opt-in tier - that a claimant's economist could use to construct a hypothetical negotiation. Third, whether the business already offers, or could credibly offer, a genuine paid or consent-based alternative, since the judgment's reasoning leans on the absence of any real choice, not merely on the presence of a standard-form contract.

None of this means a UK collective claim is likely against any specific company, and the substantive law here is still being tested at trial. It does mean that the size of a future claim is no longer bounded by what a class representative can prove was actually lost, and that changes how litigation risk on free, non-negotiated data terms should be assessed and budgeted for across the UK market, ahead of any individual case reaching a verdict.

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