A B.C. Supreme Court judge has certified a class action against Apple that alleges the company was paid to stay out of the search engine business, letting Google overcharge Canadian advertisers.
The proposed class covers every Canadian resident who bought search ads from Google from 2005 to the present. The representative plaintiff is Spark Event Rentals Ltd., an event rental company in Pemberton, B.C.
Justice Thomas released the decision on Nov. 6. Certification lets the case go forward as a class proceeding. It is not a ruling on whether the allegations are true, and none of them have been proven in court.
The Google default deal
The case centres on the agreements that make Google the default search engine on Apple products. According to the claim, the deal began around 2005 with Apple’s Safari browser and was extended to the iPhone in 2007, then to Siri and Spotlight search in 2016. In return, Google pays Apple a share of the advertising revenue earned from searches on Apple devices, which the plaintiff says amounts to billions of dollars.
The plaintiff alleges that Apple also agreed not to compete with Google in search or search advertising. Without the deal, it says, Apple would likely have built or bought its own search engine. The claim says that kept Google’s market power intact, allowing it to charge advertisers “supracompetitive” prices and share the proceeds with Apple.
The plaintiff relies on section 45 of the federal Competition Act, which bans conspiracies between competitors, and on claims of unlawful means conspiracy, unjust enrichment, fraudulent concealment and, for Quebec class members, the Civil Code of Québec.
Built on the U.S. case against Google
Much of the evidence comes from the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google. In that case, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Google’s default search agreements, including the one with Apple, violated the monopoly provision of the Sherman Act. Apple was not a party to that case.
Justice Thomas ruled that the facts set out in Mehta’s decisions can be used in the B.C. case as evidence, though Mehta’s conclusions themselves cannot be used that way.
The judge pointed to testimony in the U.S. trial from two Apple executives. John Giannandrea, senior vice-president of machine learning and AI strategy, said Apple had the money and technology to build or acquire a general search engine but chose not to. He also said Apple had studied the idea from 2018 onward and recognized that having its own engine would likely end the Google deal, putting the two companies in “head-to-head” competition. Eddy Cue, senior vice-president of services, testified that Apple wanted its “fair share” of revenue under the agreement.
That evidence, the judge found, provides some basis in fact for the inference that Apple did not compete with Google because of the agreement.
Apple’s defence
Apple argued it was an “innocent bystander.” It said the arrangement was an ordinary distribution agreement, which is allowed under Canadian competition law, and that the claim of an agreement not to compete was speculation. Apple also argued that the U.S. rulings concerned Google’s conduct, not its own, and that the real dispute is with Google and belongs in arbitration.
The judge did not accept those arguments at this stage. The judge found it was not “clear and obvious” that the conspiracy claim would fail. On the question of reach, the judge noted that the plaintiff alleges the agreement was carried out in Canada through Canadian subsidiaries, which brings it within the Competition Act.
Why Google isn’t the defendant
Spark originally sued Google as well. In 2023, Justice Thomas stayed the claim against Google because Google’s advertising contract contains an arbitration clause. The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld that decision in 2024. Spark then dropped its case against Google, never began arbitration, and carried on against Apple alone.
Apple argued the plaintiff could get the same compensation from Google through arbitration. The judge disagreed. The availability of relief from another party carried “limited import,” the judge wrote, and it has never been decided whether the dispute even falls within Google’s arbitration clause.
Counting the overcharge
A key fight at the hearing was whether damages could be calculated across the whole class. The plaintiff’s economist, Dr. James Brander, proposed comparing Google’s profitability with benchmark groups of other firms to estimate how much advertisers were overcharged, an approach used in an earlier B.C. case against Microsoft.
Apple’s expert, Dr. Sweeting, raised several objections. He argued, for example, that only Meta is comparable to Google in size. The judge called these implementation issues for trial and found the method “a reasonable possibility” for estimating overcharges.
Much of the data needed sits with Google in the United States. The plaintiff proposes obtaining it through U.S. court procedures. The judge noted that Google produced similar data in the U.S. litigation and said that if the data proves unavailable, the case can be decertified later.
The judge also allowed punitive damages to proceed as a common issue.
Source: Spark Event Rentals Ltd. v Apple Inc., 2026 BCSC 1971, Supreme Court of British Columbia, reasons for judgment re: certification, Nov. 6, 2026.
