Ann Pope spent most of her career on the other side of this argument. As a senior official at Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority, she helped lead the regulator’s examination of the mobile-ecosystem market and the app stores that anchor it. On Thursday she appeared at the Competition Appeal Tribunal as the named claimant in a collective action seeking 2 billion pounds, about $2.7 billion, from Apple on behalf of thousands of app developers.
The lawsuit targets App Tracking Transparency, the feature Apple introduced in 2021 that requires a third-party app to obtain a user’s explicit permission before following that user across other companies’ apps and websites. Apple’s own services, Ms. Pope alleges, are held to a different standard. The company gathers data through its own apps and sells advertising against it without passing through the same gate, leaving developers to comply with rules their gatekeeper does not keep.
In her telling, the asymmetry amounts to an abuse of a dominant position. “The rules apply one standard to businesses that depend on Apple to reach their customers, and another to Apple itself,” she said in a statement announcing the claim. British companies that rely on the iPhone as a channel to market, she argued, have suffered losses they cannot recover except through the courts.
Apple had not responded to the filing as of Thursday. The company has long defended the feature as a privacy safeguard, noting that it built the permission prompt in response to user concerns about surveillance-style advertising and that its own ad targeting draws on data gathered on the device or supplied with consent. Whether the tribunal accepts that distinction is now a question with a price tag attached.
In practice, the prompt reshaped the economics of mobile advertising. Most users decline the request when it appears, and the data available to third-party advertisers shrank sharply as a result, pushing spending toward the platforms that hold first-party data about their own users. Apple is the largest of those platforms, and critics say the rule quietly concentrated the market it claims to protect.
The case is the newest stop in a wider European reckoning over the same feature. The French competition authority fined Apple 150 million euros in 2025 over what it called abusive conditions in the way the tracking rules are applied, the European Commission has examined whether the design complies with the Digital Markets Act, and courts in several countries have heard complaints from publishers and advertising-technology companies who say the pop-up emptied the market for personalized ads. The numbers were never abstract. Meta, the biggest seller of mobile display advertising affected by the change, told investors the feature would cost it about $10 billion of advertising revenue in 2022 alone.
What is new is the mechanism, and Britain has become the preferred arena for it. Collective actions here run on an opt-out basis, so developers are members of the claim unless they step out, and litigation funders who bankroll the cases take a share of any recovery. That structure has made London one of Europe’s busiest venues for antitrust damages. Lawyers who follow the field said the claim fits a pattern: last month a large technology company settled a similar collective action for 260 million pounds, a figure that showed both the appetite of the regime and the scale of the payouts it can produce.
Ms. Pope brings unusual weight to the fight. As a regulator she pressed Apple and Google over app-store terms and helped lead the market study that persuaded Britain to create its own digital-markets regime, which took effect last year and gives the authority power to designate gatekeepers and impose conduct requirements on them. Her move from the regulator’s building to the tribunal benches has given the claim a momentum that a purely commercial lawsuit might lack, according to people close to the case.
Apple is no stranger to the tribunal. It is separately defending collective claims over app-store commissions that British courts have allowed to proceed. Its defense in the tracking case is expected to turn on definitions: the company says it does not track users across third-party apps in the sense the rules forbid, and that its advertising relies on data tied to a user’s own device rather than on profiles assembled across the web. Whether the tribunal treats that as a genuine privacy design or a convenient carve-out is likely to decide the outcome.
Developers who back the claim describe the stakes in blunter terms. The feature, they say, did not end behavioral advertising so much as reroute it into Apple’s own inventory, where the platform sells ads against data its competitors cannot touch. If Ms. Pope prevails, damages could run well beyond the benchmark set by last month’s settlement, and Apple could be forced to run its advertising business under the same rules it writes for everyone else.
For now the case is at its beginning. Apple has not filed a defense, and a trial is unlikely before 2028, lawyers said. But the direction is clear: the privacy feature that Apple markets as a gift to users is being litigated, from London to Paris to Washington, as a tool of competitive advantage, and the bill for that argument has been presented.
