Canada's Competition Tribunal has ordered Google to pay more than C$358,000 in costs to the Competition Bureau — C$277,600 in expert fees, C$54,000 in legal fees, and roughly C$26,600 for transcripts and printing — after the company lost a constitutional challenge to the penalty regime underlying the Bureau's ad-tech abuse-of-dominance case (BNN Bloomberg, June 5, 2026). The costs order is a footnote. The ruling that produced it, handed down by the Tribunal on March 3, 2026, is not.
What Google Actually Challenged
The Bureau sued Google in November 2024, alleging the company tied together its publisher ad server, ad exchange, and buying tools to entrench dominance across the online advertising supply chain — conduct it says goes back to 2008 and has touched over 200 billion Canadian ad transactions (Globe and Mail, Nov. 2024). The Bureau wants the Tribunal to force a breakup of Google's publisher-side and exchange tools, plus a penalty.
That penalty is where things got interesting. Section 79(3.1) of the Competition Act — added in 2022 and expanded in 2023 — lets the Tribunal impose an administrative monetary penalty of the greater of a statutory minimum or "three times the value of the benefit derived from the anti-competitive practice, or, if that amount cannot be reasonably determined, 3% of the person's annual worldwide gross revenues" (Competition Act, s. 79(3.1)). Applied to Google's cumulative global revenue since 2008, that formula could theoretically top C$91 billion. Google argued a penalty of that magnitude functions as a "true penal consequence," and that imposing it through an administrative tribunal rather than a criminal court violates its rights under section 11 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Tribunal Said No — Emphatically
Justice Andrew Little rejected the challenge, calling the C$91-billion figure "hypothetical at best" since it depends on liability findings the Tribunal hasn't made (Globe and Mail, March 2026). More importantly, he found AMPs under the Competition Act are regulatory rather than penal in purpose — Parliament wrote the provision to "promote practices... in conformity with the purposes" of the Act, not to punish — and that Google's evidence of reputational stigma fell short of what criminal conviction implies (Norton Rose Fulbright analysis). Acting Commissioner of Competition Jeanne Pratt called the ruling a reinforcement of the Bureau's "clear authority to order administrative monetary penalties to promote compliance and deter anti-competitive behaviour" (Competition Bureau statement, March 4, 2026).
Google has since appealed the constitutional ruling to the Federal Court of Appeal. The underlying case is bifurcated: liability first, remedy — including any penalty — only if Google is found to have abused its dominance.
Steelmanning the Bureau's Position
There is a real case for taking large AMPs seriously as deterrence, not overreach. A statutory minimum of C$25 million, or even a few hundred million, is rounding error for a company that reported over $350 billion in 2024 revenue — a fine that small is priced in as a cost of doing business rather than a reason to change conduct. The Bureau's expert argued in the constitutional hearing that steep penalties are necessary precisely because detection rates for tying and self-preferencing in ad tech are low; if the expected penalty is discounted by a small chance of getting caught, only a large headline number restores real deterrence. Courts in the EU and US have made similar arguments about revenue-scaled fines for dominant platforms, and Little's finding that the AMP ceiling is a ceiling, not a mandatory sentence — with mandatory consideration of factors like competitive impact before any number is set — is a reasonable middle path between toothless fines and confiscatory ones.
Why the Ceiling Still Matters
But a defensible ceiling and a defensible number are different things, and this is where the case deserves continued scrutiny rather than applause. A theoretical C$91-billion exposure — even if Little is right that it's "hypothetical" pending liability findings — changes how every dominant firm operating in Canada calibrates legal and product risk long before any tribunal rules on the merits. Uncapped, revenue-scaled AMPs create genuine uncertainty for firms trying to plan multi-year product roadmaps, and that uncertainty is not free: it can chill investment and product integration that has nothing to do with anticompetitive tying. The Tribunal was right that a penalty need not be criminal-sized to deter meaningfully — but the same logic argues for the Bureau seeking penalties proportionate to actual, provable harm once liability is established, not maximalist headline figures calculated by multiplying eighteen years of global revenue.
The more consequential fight is still ahead: whether Google actually tied its ad tech tools unlawfully, and if so, what remedy — structural divestiture, behavioral conduct rules, or a large fine — fits the harm. Canada should not need a nine-figure number to prove it takes platform dominance seriously; it needs a remedy that restores contestability in ad tech markets. That case hasn't been decided yet. The C$358,000 costs order is a reminder that Google chose to fight the wrong battle first.