The High Court has proposed asking the EU’s highest court to clarify key rules governing €530 million in GDPR fines imposed on TikTok by the Data Protection Commission.
The ruling follows an earlier June 2026 judgment in which Mr Justice Rory Mulcahy upheld the DPC’s findings that TikTok infringed GDPR rules governing transfers of personal data to China and transparency to users between July 2020 and May 2023. He also upheld the finding that the infringements were negligent and could attract administrative fines.
The outstanding dispute concerns how those fines were calculated. The DPC imposed €485 million for infringement of Article 46(1) and €45 million for infringement of Article 13(1)(f).
TikTok argues that the regulator wrongly relied on the worldwide turnover of parent company ByteDance when fixing the fines and that ByteDance should have been given its own opportunity to defend its position. TikTok also disputes the DPC’s aggregation of the two fines because both infringements arose from the same processing operations.
Mulcahy J rejected several other parts of TikTok’s case. He held that the DPC was entitled to use ByteDance’s 2024 turnover as the preceding financial year and could presume that ByteDance exercised decisive influence over TikTok because of the group’s ownership structure. TikTok had not rebutted that presumption.
The judge also found no basis to interfere with the DPC’s overall assessment of proportionality or the adequacy of its reasoning. He identified limited errors in how individual fining factors were classified but said these had operated overall to TikTok’s benefit and did not justify changing the fines.
However, he concluded that four questions of EU law were not sufficiently clear to determine without guidance from the Court of Justice. They concern whether liability must be attributed to a parent before its turnover is used, whether that parent must be heard, when group turnover enters the calculation, and whether separate fines for linked infringements may be added together.
The final outcome of TikTok’s challenge to the €530 million penalties therefore remains unresolved pending the proposed EU reference.