A second billion-pound front against Apple in London
On September 3, 2026, a new opt-out class action landed at London's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) seeking £2 billion (~$2.7 billion) from Apple. The claimant vehicle, ATT Collective Action Limited, is led by Ann Pope, a former senior antitrust director at the Competition and Markets Authority, and coordinated by law firm Hausfeld (Claims Journal). The allegation: Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, introduced in April 2021, imposed a tougher consent standard on third-party developers than Apple applied to its own advertising and data operations — an abuse of Apple's gatekeeper position under UK competition law (TechXplore).
Apple disputes this. The company says ATT gives users "a simple way to control whether apps have permission to track them" and that Apple is "bound by the exact same requirements as all developers" (TechXplore). The claim has not been certified — the CAT must first decide whether it can proceed as a collective action at all, a threshold stage that has sunk ambitious UK claims before.
Steelmanning the claim
The strongest version of this case is not that privacy consent prompts are bad — it's that a dominant platform designing its own consent architecture creates an obvious conflict of interest. If Apple's interstitial genuinely used harsher framing (warning icons, the loaded word "tracking") for rivals than for comparable first-party data use, that is a textbook self-preferencing concern, not a hypothetical one. Germany's Bundeskartellamt has separately scrutinized ATT's prompt design on exactly this theory. A gatekeeper that writes the rules of consent for a market it also competes in has the means and the motive to tilt the wording, and competition law exists precisely to police that kind of structural conflict, not just outright exclusion.
Why the tribunal, not the headline figure, matters most
What makes this filing more than a copycat lawsuit is where it lands. The CAT ruled against Apple on a related but distinct claim just eleven months earlier: on October 23, 2025, in Kent v Apple ([2025] CAT 67), the tribunal unanimously found Apple had abused its dominant position by excluding rival app stores and charging excessive App Store commissions, ordering roughly £1.5 billion in damages to around 36 million UK consumers and businesses (Competition Appeal Tribunal; Hausfeld). Apple sought permission to appeal; the CAT refused it on November 13, 2025, and Apple has since taken the fight to the Court of Appeal. That history matters because it establishes the CAT is willing to certify and rule against Apple on gatekeeper conduct at scale — this is not a novel or untested forum for claimants.
The ATT suit also arrives inside a UK regulatory apparatus that has already concluded Apple's mobile platform warrants special scrutiny. On October 22, 2025, the CMA formally designated Apple's mobile platform — its OS, App Store, and Safari/WebKit — with Strategic Market Status under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the legal threshold that lets the CMA impose bespoke conduct requirements (GOV.UK). SMS designation itself doesn't prove wrongdoing — the CMA is explicit that it's a market-position finding, not a verdict — but it means Apple is now operating under a UK regime built specifically to catch exactly the kind of asymmetric-rules complaint Pope's claim describes.
The case for skepticism
Even granting the structural conflict-of-interest argument, opt-out UK class actions carry real risk of overreach. Certification standards exist because not every commercial disadvantage that flows from a platform's design choices is an antitrust violation — developers lost ad revenue when users declined tracking broadly, including on Apple's own inventory, and privacy defaults that happen to reduce third-party data collection are not automatically anticompetitive just because they're commercially inconvenient. The Kent precedent involved a comparatively clean, quantifiable harm — a 30% commission applied uniformly and provably above cost. Proving that ATT's specific wording — not the policy of requiring consent at all — caused £2 billion in damages requires the tribunal to disentangle a privacy design choice from a competitive one, a much harder evidentiary task, and one where a wrong ruling risks discouraging platforms from building privacy protections that most users say they want.
What should actually happen
Proportionate regulation here doesn't mean waving the claim through — it means letting certification do its job: test whether the wording asymmetry was real, material, and caused quantifiable harm, rather than settling the question by headline figure alone. If the CAT finds Apple genuinely wrote softer prompts for itself, that is a fair and narrow abuse-of-dominance finding, consistent with the CMA's own SMS framework, that punishes rule-rigging without punishing the underlying privacy policy. If it doesn't, dismissal at certification protects a legitimate design choice from being retroactively recast as a competition violation just because Apple is now a designated gatekeeper. Either outcome is preferable to treating gatekeeper status itself as proof of guilt — which is the risk every new billion-pound filing against Apple in London now carries.