Meta has filed for a judicial review of Ofcom’s methodology for setting fees and penalties under the Online Safety Act, arguing that pegging charges to a company’s qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) is disproportionate and out of step with the geographic scope of the regulator’s remit. A hearing has been scheduled for 13 and 14 October.
The stakes are considerable. Under the Act, Ofcom can levy fines of up to 10 per cent of QWR or £18m, whichever is higher. Given that Meta reported global revenues of roughly $201bn last year, the regulator could in theory issue a penalty of around $20bn, a sum that would dwarf the largest fines in UK corporate history. The fee regime introduced last September applies the same QWR principle to annual tariffs, capturing companies whose user-generated content, search or adult-content services in the UK generate more than £250m a year.
Meta contends that liability should be determined by activity within the jurisdiction doing the regulating. “We and others in the tech industry believe its decisions on the methodology to calculate fees and potential fines are disproportionate,” a company spokesperson said. “We believe fees and penalties should be based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in. This would still allow Ofcom to impose the largest fines in UK corporate history.”
Court documents filed on Meta’s behalf by Monica Carss-Frisk KC describe Ofcom’s approach as “troubling”, warning that it would result in a handful of large platforms shouldering the bulk of the regulator’s costs even though the Act covers a much broader sweep of internet services. The barrister noted that QWR is not pegged to revenue generated by any particular service in the UK; rather, once a service is offered to British users, the entirety of its global turnover is counted.
Ofcom, for its part, is preparing to dig in. The regulator said its fees and fines framework reflected “a plain reading of the law” and pledged to “robustly defend our reasoning and decisions”.
Meta is not alone in pushing back. The US online forum 4chan has refused to pay penalties imposed under the Act, and Ofcom is facing separate litigation from the operators of both 4chan and Kiwi Farms. The regime has also drawn criticism from Donald Trump’s White House, which has signalled growing impatience with European digital rules that it sees as targeting American firms.
The financial significance of the new system for Ofcom itself is hard to overstate. Once the preserve of broadcasters and telecoms operators paying for spectrum and licence fees, the regulator now expects the bulk of its £233m budget for the year to come from online safety tariffs, which are forecast to bring in £164m. That marks one of the most substantial shifts in Ofcom’s funding base in its two-decade history.
For SME founders watching from the sidelines, the case is more than a transatlantic skirmish between Big Tech and a British quango. The threshold of £250m in qualifying turnover means most smaller platforms sit outside the fee net, but the principles being tested in October, how revenue is attributed across borders, and how proportionality is measured for global digital businesses, will shape the regulatory environment for any UK-based scale-up that one day finds itself trading internationally on the back of user-generated content. The judgment, when it comes, will be read closely well beyond Menlo Park.
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Meta launches high court challenge against Ofcom over online safety act fines
Theme park prohibition strangely opens the door to a new kind of creative freedom.
When you visit Ghibli Park in Nagakute City, Aichi Prefecture, you’ll find a vast array of attractions, including life-sized buildings that look like they’ve jumped straight out of a Studio Ghibli film. However, if you research the park beforehand to see what the rooms inside these buildings look like, you’ll notice something else: there isn’t a wide variety of interior photos on social media.
That might sound odd, given Ghibli’s worldwide fame and loyal fanbase, but the lack of photos doesn’t mean there’s no desire to share them online. Rather, it’s because photography is strictly prohibited inside most of the buildings. Instead, the park limits interior photos to the Becoming Characters in Memorable Ghibli Scenes exhibit inside Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, where visitors can step into life-sized dioramas depicting 14 famous film scenes.
All of this came as a surprise to our Japanese-language reporter Saya Togashi when she visited the park for the first time recently. Unaware of the photography ban in the large majority of the buildings, her initial disappointment turned into an eye-opening experience both literally and figuratively, so she decided to share some thoughts on the ban and the surprising effect it had on her visit.
▼ Saya with her Ghibli Park entry band.
1. People don’t linger to take photos
The most obvious benefit to come from the ban is the fact that it prevents people from lingering too long in an area while trying to capture the perfect shot. Every exhibit presents a perfect photo opportunity, as each display creates an ideal backdrop that makes visitors look as though they’ve stepped into an anime world, and the attention to detail in the objects inside the buildings is so impressive that you could take hundreds of photos and it still wouldn’t be enough, which is why the ban feels necessary.
With so many small rooms inside, there isn’t much space to move around – even if one person stopped to take a picture it would cause a huge holdup for visitors. The photography ban ensures the crowds move smoothly through the exhibits, creating a more pleasant environment for everyone to enjoy what they’re seeing.
Another advantage is the absence of live video streamers. Even when they aren’t being intentionally disruptive, live streaming can cause anxiety for people nearby, as not everyone wants their face broadcast around the world without consent. In a country like Japan, where publishing identifiable photos of people without permission may violate privacy or image rights, the absence of cameras creates a sense of ease and safety that allows everyone to relax.
2. Visitors can concentrate on what’s in front of them
When you can’t take pictures, or when you don’t have your smartphone in your hand, something beautiful happens: you naturally start to focus on what’s in front of you. Though photography may be prohibited, visitors are allowed to touch many of the exhibits, engaging the sense of touch and creating a multi-sensory experience that benefits from full attention. This gesture of goodwill by the park, which prioritises the visitor experience over concerns about theft or damage, helps nurture an environment of care and respect that you might not find in other amusement parks.
In Mei and Satsuki’s House, for instance, opening a closet door reveals bedding and pyjamas belonging to the Kusakabe family, who star in the film My Neighbour Totoro. The dresser contains the father’s clothes, which carry a faint smell of mothballs. You can search for the stairs leading to the second floor, just like in the movie, and even find Mei’s hat. It’s a continuous stream of discoveries that gives you a great sense of satisfaction in finding things for yourself.
Without the scrutiny of a smartphone screen, our senses become sharper. The small size of Mei’s clothes and the way they feel in your hand, the creaking of the closet, the sense of everyday life emanating from the old dishes in the kitchen – these are now vividly etched into Saya’s memory as real lived experiences.
In the documentary Until Ghibli Park is Finished, director Goro Miyazaki told his staff, “It’s good to touch the house as much as possible, like refolding clothes as if you were actually living there.” That sense of bringing the house to life is clearly evident, and it allows visitors to appreciate just how impressive it is that Satsuki and Mei’s House is built to be fully functional, with features such as a wood-fired stove for boiling water and a hearth for cooking rice. If God is in the details, so is Studio Ghibli.
3. There are no spoilers
In this era where everyone is a photographer, any place and any event can be easily experienced virtually through the Internet. Although we might know there are things that can only be understood by being there and experiencing them firsthand, videos and images can have a huge impact on our perception.
At Ghibli Park, however, very little prior information is available beyond officially released details about the different rooms and exhibits. Since photography is prohibited indoors in many areas of the park, visitors experience the spaces with almost no spoilers beforehand.
Because you encounter the actual settings and objects without prior exposure, everything feels fresh and surprising. Saya felt this especially strongly in Howl’s Moving Castle, where she had goosebumps after stepping into the dimly lit castle from the bright outdoors. Once your eyes adjust, you’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cluttered everyday objects and magical items laid out in front of you, appearing just as it was in the movie.
Although it’s an area visitors can’t touch, Howl’s bedroom, meticulously recreated with small objects, sounds, lights, and movements, is a must-see. It’s truly moving to witness something you’ve only ever seen in the 2-D anime world come to life before your eyes, complete with weight, scent, and texture.
Sure, Ghibli Park might not have big rides with elaborate special effects or dazzling shows, but that’s actually its charm. The dedication to creating special spaces and the sheer scale of its construction surpasses those of many world-class theme parks, and it’s something you can sense in every area.
After visiting the park, Saya came to realise the merits and demerits of modern theme parks that rely on social media sharing. Keen to update their operational policies to keep pace with the times, theme parks are shifting from being places where visitors immerse themselves in carefully crafted worlds and becoming platforms for sharing experiences, primarily through social media.
Saya has felt the tide turn firsthand at Disney Resorts, where she used to attend the New Year’s Eve countdown event every year. Although getting tickets was always a bit of a struggle, once you were inside the park, you could easily enjoy all the events, like watching shows, enjoying limited-edition food and drinks, and buying New Year’s items, without the need for any special strategy or plan. Of course, there were lines, but as long as visitors waited patiently, they could achieve their theme park goals, especially as visitors wandered the grounds discovering things along the way.
However, one year things changed. Even immediately after opening, the shelves for New Year’s items were empty, special menu items were all sold out, and the atmosphere at events became tense, with staff shouting to control crowds as people scrambled to secure prime viewing spots. This was around the time when the social media culture of sharing one’s own experiences and the business of profiting from reselling began. It created a world of competition and anxiety, where people have to work harder to buy the things they want and experience the things they want to experience — things that once felt much simpler before the age of social media.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the theme parks themselves; the spread of information on social media and the increased rarity of merchandise are simply the result of fans’ enthusiasm. However, it does have an impact on the visitor experience, and after visiting Ghibli Park, Saya walked away with her eyes opened to what can be possible when visitors are prioritised over financial profit. By creating sensory worlds that can’t be fully captured in photographs, Ghibli Park encourages visitors to engage with the world around them, fostering face-to-face communication and a sense of adventure that lies at the heart of every Ghibli film.
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SINGAPORE: Scrolling through LinkedIn, the online professional networking and career development platform, can feel like attending a never-ending awards night. One of your friends becomes a vice-president, while another buys a condominium.
Then, someone else posts a business-class work trip and celebrates a promotion with a polished photo and hundreds of congratulatory comments. For many working adults in Singapore, this type of stream of updates can create an uncomfortable thought: Am I falling behind?
According to Channel NewsAsia (CNA), career experts say feeling this way has become harder to avoid because career milestones are now more visible online, more frequent and easier to compare. It’s the very pressure that 27-year-old Shania Tsing is currently experiencing.
After leaving her previous role as a sales engineer in 2025 to work in events management, she accepted a lower salary in exchange for work she enjoyed more. Even though she feels happier in her current role, comments from people around her and constant exposure to friends reaching life milestones sometimes make her question whether she made the right call.
Career comparison is not new, but what has changed is its speed and visibility. Career counsellors said that people compare themselves with those of similar age and background because they feel like the easiest measuring stick.
Over time, people may start using public signs of success to judge how well they are doing, rather than deciding what progress means for themselves.
Clinical counsellor Stella Ong said many people aren’t chasing someone else’s success. They are trying to answer a silent question: Am I progressing at the right pace?
Platforms like LinkedIn make that question harder to avoid, as career updates now appear alongside daily browsing.
Promotions, job changes, and achievements arrive continuously, creating the impression that everyone else is accelerating while you remain still. Impressions like this can slowly reset what people consider normal.
Experts interviewed pointed out something many people already suspect but rarely say aloud: online career updates are selective.
Recruitment and leadership coach Connie Low explained that professional announcements are frequently shaped to present someone in the best possible light. Job titles also differ across firms and industries, making direct comparisons unreliable.
On top of that, there is another career wrinkle: job title inflation. Global talent consultancy Robert Walters reported that Singapore saw growth in senior-sounding job titles in recent years, including roles labelled “manager” and “director” for people with relatively limited experience. Those titles don’t always align with their actual salary, authority, or scope of work.
Low also noted that promotion rates are lower than many assume. Based on industry benchmarks she referenced, only a small portion of employees receive promotions in a typical year. Most careers move more slowly than social media, such as LinkedIn, suggests.
So people rarely post their ordinary or not-so-good years. No one, in the general sense, uploads a status saying they stayed in the same role, did solid work and just went home.
The career experts added that the answer isn’t to stop comparing entirely. Comparison can still motivate people if it ignites the fire of learning within, rather than self-doubt. The problem starts when it becomes constant and begins to shape how people see themselves.
One helpful change is to change the question. Instead of asking whether someone else is ahead, ask whether your current path matches your values, interests and goals.
Counsellors also suggested getting reality checks from managers, mentors, recruiters or experienced colleagues instead of relying on what appears online. Keeping a record of personal achievements can help, too, because it provides a defined view of progress over time.
Tsing said she has now started placing more weight on enjoying her work and on fostering a healthy workplace culture than on chasing visible milestones. A mindset switch that has helped her reduce comparisons.
Career progress doesn’t always arrive in neat age brackets. Some people move fast. Others change direction. Most are doing better than their feeds suggest. So use LinkedIn as a noticeboard, not a scoreboard. A job title can impress strangers for five seconds, but building work you can live with lasts much longer.
This article (Career experts: Singapore workers aren’t as far ahead in their jobs as their LinkedIn work update suggests) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.
Promoted Content.
Margin compression is forcing a reckoning for business leaders. The pressure to innovate, capture market share, and scale is relentless. Yet the escalating costs of domestic labor, inflation, and technology infrastructure are steadily eating away at profitability.
When the cost of simply keeping the business running outpaces revenue growth, companies hit a dangerous plateau.
Historically, business owners responded to this margin squeeze with a simple, tactical approach to outsourcing: finding the absolute cheapest overseas labor to handle baseline tasks.
However, this "race to the bottom" often resulted in poor work quality, constant communication breakdowns, and hidden management costs that negated any initial financial gains.
The paradigm has shifted. Forward-thinking companies are moving from tactical cost-cutting to strategic business outsourcing. This approach leans more towards structural optimization, converting rigid fixed costs into flexible variable costs, and freeing up expensive internal bandwidth.
Here is a comprehensive blueprint for significantly reducing operational costs through a strategic, risk-managed outsourcing framework.
Before looking externally at vendors, leadership teams must conduct a ruthless internal audit using the "Core vs. Context" framework. Most companies bleed money because they pay premium domestic salaries for context-level work.
The Real-World Example: Consider a growing third-party logistics (3PL) company. Their "Core" is negotiating carrier rates, designing supply chain strategies, and managing top-tier enterprise clients. Their "Context" is track-and-trace data entry, auditing freight bills, and fielding routine "where is my truck" calls.
If that company's $90,000-per-year Logistics Account Manager is spending three hours a day manually typing tracking numbers into an Excel sheet or chasing down missed delivery receipts, the company is actively losing money.
By strategically offloading that context-heavy tracking department to an offshore team, the Account Manager reclaims 15 hours a week to focus strictly on upselling clients and generating revenue.
When executed strategically, outsourcing attacks operational bloat and inefficiency from four distinct angles:
The difference in base salaries between domestic and offshore talent is the most obvious benefit. However, true operational savings come from eliminating the Total Cost of Engagement.
The Example: A Level 1 Customer Support Agent in the U.S. might have a base salary of $40,000. But that is just the baseline. When you add the employer portion of payroll taxes (FICA), a conservative $6,000 for health insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off, equipment, and HR recruitment fees, the true cost is closer to $55,000. Partnering with a strategic BPO replaces that $55,000 liability with a flat, predictable vendor invoice of perhaps $18,000 to $24,000 annually, eliminating domestic HR compliance and benefits overhead.
In-house teams require significant physical and digital infrastructure. Expanding your domestic team by 10 people doesn't just mean 10 new salaries; it means leasing an additional 1,000 square feet of office space, buying 10 enterprise-grade laptops, and paying for IT setup and software seat licenses.
By partnering with an offshore team, businesses instantly reduce their real estate footprint and hardware procurement. The BPO partner absorbs these Capital Expenditures, shifting what used to be a massive upfront cash drain into a manageable monthly operating expense.
Internal processes naturally degrade over time. Workarounds become the norm, and institutional knowledge gets trapped in the heads of a few key employees.
The Example: Look at Accounts Payable. In-house, it might involve an office manager manually matching PDF invoices to purchase orders and sending emails to chase down department heads for approval. When you migrate this process to an outsourcing partner, they force you to standardize. The BPO will help map the workflow, implement strict Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and perhaps introduce simple OCR (Optical Character Recognition) automation. This process standardization drops the cost-per-invoice processed from an inefficient $12 down to a streamlined $3.
Domestic hiring is rigid. You are financially liable for your team, whether they are working at 100% capacity or 40%. Strategic outsourcing provides an elastic workforce.
The Example: An e-commerce brand doing $10M in revenue might see 40% of its sales concentrated in Q4. Hiring and training 15 domestic temporary workers in October, only to lay them off in January, is an HR nightmare. Strategic outsourcing allows the brand to spin up a trained, seasonal pod of 15 agents in September, and seamlessly scale back down to a core team of 5 in February, matching labor costs perfectly with revenue cycles.
The biggest threat to an outsourcing initiative is the "inefficiency tax"—the time, money, and customer goodwill lost to poor communication or dropped balls. To protect your bottom line, rigorous risk management must be built into the partnership from day one.
When evaluating global offshore destinations, business leaders must look beyond the lowest price tag and assess the overall value and reliability of the region. The Philippines consistently ranks as a premier hub because it offers specialized, highly educated talent pools, not just general virtual assistants.
Whether a business needs U.S. GAAP-trained accountants, registered nurses for healthcare administration, or certified IT helpdesk technicians, the talent exists in abundance.
The workforce boasts exceptional, neutral English proficiency and a profound cultural affinity with Western business practices, making integration seamless.
For companies looking to transition from a fully domestic operation to a highly resilient hybrid model, partnering with an established firm in hubs like Clark Outsourcing provides the ideal balance: aggressive cost savings without sacrificing talent quality or operational security.
True operational cost reduction requires moving past theory and into immediate, measurable execution. If you want to structurally transform your bottom line, take the 90-Day Strategic Outsourcing Challenge:
Outsourcing is evolving into a fundamental strategy for business agility and survival. You can start this transformation today by asking your department heads one clarifying question: "What is the single most time-consuming task you do every week that a smart person with a clear instruction manual could do for you?" Whatever their answer is, that’s exactly where you begin.
Post sponsored by Clark Outsourcing
Zack Williamson
Zack Williamson is a business strategist with experience in outsourcing, operations management, and helping companies scale through high-performing remote teams. He specializes in creating efficient workforce solutions that support growth, improve productivity, and reduce operational costs. With a practical approach to leadership and business development, Zack shares insights on outsourcing, talent acquisition, and building sustainable organizations in a competitive global market.
Company: Clark Outsourcing
Website: https://clarkoutsourcing.com
© Getty Images
Exclusive: Former minister calls for urgent action against companies such as X that allow incitement to violence
Wes Streeting has called for Keir Starmer to take urgent action against X and other online platforms that have helped whip up social tensions, suggesting they should be forced to contribute to rebuilding costs after the riots in Belfast.
The intervention by the former health secretary, who is seen as a likely challenger to Keir Starmer in any leadership contest, comes after Downing Street said any response would be left to Ofcom, the media regulator, meaning no action is likely for at least two months.
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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
“We can count the votes that were cast. We cannot recover the votes that were never allowed to be cast,” writes Gilles Vernier, a researcher at the Sciences Po in Paris. Vernier, who had helped build up electoral data from past elections while at Ashoka University, has been a long-time poll analyst.
In a column published in The Economic Times on 5 May 2026, however, he wrote that he was unable to analyse the results in West Bengal. Election Commission’s interference, he added, had muddied the outcome and ‘precluded any clear analysis’.
Newspapers and the electronic media, however, scrupulously avoided mentioning the role of SIR which disenfranchised 34 lakh voters in West Bengal, all of them Indian citizens (even the election commission does not say they are foreigners or Bangladeshis) on dubious grounds. Barely 1,600 of them could reach out to the appellate tribunals which restored 99 per cent of them back to the electoral roll. Which way they would have voted cannot obviously be known but that a disproportionate number of them were women and Muslims are now public knowledge.
Headlines foregrounded spectacle and personality. Images of Narendra Modi in a Bengali-style dhoti dominated front pages, with newspapers crediting him for the BJP’s performance in Bengal and Assam. Wordplay flourished. The Tribune ingeniously but clumsily highlighted ‘Bengal’s historic TriNAMOol shift’. ‘JeetMuri’ was the headline in Rajasthan Patrika, a laboured reference to the photo-op of the prime minister’s stop to buy the popular street snack jhalmuri (puffed rice with green chilli, onions and other condiments) while campaigning in Jhargram.
Among Hindi newspapers, The Navbharat Times (NBT) carried a large illustration of the penalty area of a football field. With goalkeeper Mamata Banerjee sprawled on the ground and Modi shown having taken the penalty kick, the ball is in the net while Amit Shah in football gear is celebrating with arms raised—the only front page that highlighted the Union home minister. The NBT headline in Hindi hailed both the men as ‘Bharatiya Rajneeti Ke Babumoshai’, whatever the headline writer and illustrator may have meant.
Newspapers, apparently. pic.twitter.com/bznEMpeiiy
— churumuri (@churumuri) May 5, 2026
The front-page report in The Economic Times, predictably perhaps, carried a large photograph of Modi in the Bengali style dhoti and dramatically put the following words, as if spoken by the Prime Minister: ‘Aandhi Ban Ke Aaya Hoon (I have arrived like a storm)’—a clear and unabashed reference to this year’s Bollywood blockbuster Dhurandhar The Revenge. The prime minister would have been pleased. Other financial dailies were less theatrical. ‘A vote for change and continuity’, headlined the Business Standard. ‘A shock verdict in Tamil Nadu and Bengal’, read the Business Line headline while Mint led with ‘Saffron storm in Bengal’. ‘Parivartan, delivered’ was the headline in Financial Express.
The front-page headline in The Telegraph splashed in orange took the easy way out. It simply said, BJP’s Bengal with the outline of Kolkata’s iconic Howrah bridge. The largest circulated Bengali daily newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika was even more cautious, headlining the verdict as the fall of Mamata and the rise of the BJP in the state. Neither SIR nor the Election Commission of India and Supreme Court found mention in the lavish coverage in the two newspapers.
The front-page headlines in newspapers outside the state were either bland or effusive. Times of India came up with ‘BJP is Bengal Janata’s Party’. Hindustan Times went with ‘Sunset for Satraps’. The Hindu, as always, played it safe and said ‘Change and Churn in Bengal, TN and Kerala’.
The Indian Express was the only one which tried to analyse the effect of SIR on voting in West Bengal, only to tie itself in knots. The misleading or mischievous headline of its front-page report read ‘Bengal SIR: TMC won 13 of 20 seats with highest voter deletions’. However, the report went on to say: ‘In the 187 seats that saw over 5,000 names deleted, the BJP won or was leading in 119. Of these 187 constituencies, the number of excluded voters was higher than the margin of victory or leads in 47. Overall, in these 187 seats—results were available for 170 and leads for 17—the number of excluded voters was higher than the margin of victory or leads in 47 seats, an analysis by The Indian Express shows.’
The Hindu in its editorial made a passing reference to the ‘tainted election process’. For all practical purposes though, the Indian media appeared to have moved on from SIR and its implications.
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