In Gormsen v Meta [2025] CAT 55, the Competition Appeal Tribunal considered for the first time whether “user damages” might be available for a breach of competition law. In what is likely to be a significant development in the field, the Tribunal has answered that question in the affirmative.

Background to the proceedings

In the underlying collective proceedings, the Class Representative (Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen) contends that Meta abused its dominant position by making access to Facebook conditional upon users giving up access to certain data concerning their off-Facebook activities.

Dr Gormsen alleges that those users would, in a counterfactual absent abuse, have received a transfer of value from Meta in return for permission to collect and use the data in question. That claim was certified in February 2024, and Meta’s application for permission to appeal was refused by the Court of Appeal in November 2024.

One of Meta’s defences to this claim is that it would never have made a payment for the users’ data in the counterfactual. Consequently, Meta says that those users ought not to be entitled to an award of conventional damages, even if Meta is found to have acted abusively.

The application and the issues before the Tribunal

In May 2025, Dr Gormsen applied for permission to amend her claim form to seek the remedy of user damages (described as “negotiating damages” by the Supreme Court in One Step (Support) Ltd v Morris-Garner [2019] AC 649).

Meta resisted the amendment application on two primary grounds:

  1. First, Meta argued that user damages can never be awarded for a breach of competition law. In so doing, it argued that two decisions of the Court of Appeal (Stoke-on-Trent City Council v W&J Wass Ltd [1988] 1 WLR 1406; Devenish Nutrition Ltd v Sanofi-Aventis SA [2009] Ch 390) constituted binding authority to this effect.
  2. Secondly, Meta argued that claims for user damages are highly individualised, and so the claims advanced by Dr Gormsen ought not to be certified.

The Tribunal’s decision

The CAT rejected both strands of Meta’s argument and allowed the amendment application. Amongst other things, it held that:

  1. Neither Wass nor Devenish decide that user damages cannot be awarded for a breach of competition law ([20]-[41]);
  2. The categories of case identified in One Step in which user damages can be awarded in tort are (contrary to Meta’s contention) not exhaustive ([15]-[16]);
  3. There are ‘parallels which can be drawn’ between Dr Gormsen’s claim for user damages and the award of user damages for other torts, and Dr Gormsen’s claim ‘has reasonable prospects of succeeding at trial’ ([44], [46]);
  4. In any event, this is a developing area of law and therefore not one which is amenable to summary determination ([45]); and
  5. Meta’s arguments in relation to certification were inconsistent both with section 47C(2) of the Competition Act 1998 and with the observations of the Court of Appeal in Merricks v Mastercard Inc [2019] Bus LR 3025, and there was no reason why, on the applicable principles, certification should not embrace the claim for user damages ([51]-[53]). 

A copy of the judgment is available here.

Ian Simester acted successfully for Dr Gormsen with Niranjan Venkatesan KC (One Essex Court) and Sarah O’Keeffe (Brick Court), instructed by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP.