A judge in British Columbia has cleared the way for a proposed class action accusing Apple of striking a revenue-sharing arrangement with Google that suppressed competition in search and drove up the price of search advertising, according to a decision released this week.
The ruling by Justice Thomas of the Supreme Court of British Columbia certifies the case as a collective proceeding. It does not decide whether Apple broke the law, does not void the search agreement and does not entitle anyone to compensation. Those questions would be settled at trial, for which no date has been set.
The suit was filed in 2021 by Spark Event Rentals Ltd., an event rental company based in the province. Google was originally a co-defendant but was dropped after a dispute over an arbitration clause in its advertising contracts, leaving Apple as the sole defendant.
The class would cover Canadian residents who bought search ads from Google at any point since 2005, the year the two companies first agreed to make Google the default search engine on Safari in return for a share of ad revenue. The plaintiffs are seeking damages for advertisers who allegedly overpaid, and the court also allowed a claim for punitive damages to move forward.
At the heart of the claim is the argument that Apple had the resources and distribution reach to build its own search engine but chose not to because Google was paying it billions of dollars to keep the default slot on Apple devices. That arrangement, the plaintiffs contend, handed Google market power and let it charge above-competitive prices for search ads.
Apple has characterized the arrangement as an ordinary distribution deal rather than an unlawful conspiracy, and argued that Google was the proper defendant, describing itself in court as an “innocent bystander.”
In his reasons, the judge leaned on evidence aired during the US Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, quoting testimony from Apple executives Eddy Cue and John Giannandrea. He concluded that the record “provides some basis in fact, supporting the inference that Apple did not compete with Google in the search engine market because of its Agreement with Google.”
He also acknowledged Apple’s objection that the plaintiffs had assembled the evidence selectively, agreeing that “the plaintiff has cherry-picked evidence to support his case” while adding that in his view “it is appropriate to do so at this stage in the proceedings.”
The judge found it was not “clear and obvious” that the plaintiffs had failed to plead a common purpose to commit an act prohibited under section 45 of the Competition Act.
The Canadian case adds to a growing stack of regulatory and legal challenges to the default-search arrangement. Authorities in the US, the UK, Australia, the EU and Japan have all examined the relationship from different angles. In August 2024, a federal judge in Washington held that Google had illegally maintained its monopoly in online search through anticompetitive agreements, including the Apple deal.
For Apple, the certification keeps alive a claim that could expose it to a large advertiser class even after it was dismissed from the US case’s remedies phase. The two companies have since widened their ties, announcing an artificial intelligence partnership involving Gemini and Siri, which is unrelated to the Canadian search litigation.
Key elements of the case:
Note: Certification resolves only whether the claims may proceed collectively, not whether they are proven.
Nothing changes for Apple device owners as a result of the ruling. The decision does not alter default search settings or require Apple to end the Google arrangement. The next stage turns on whether the plaintiffs can show the competitive harm they allege.
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