Google is facing a £7 billion class action lawsuit in the UK after the Competition Appeal Tribunal certified a collective action accusing the tech giant of abusing its dominant position in mobile search. The tribunal dismissed Google’s objections to the claim proceeding, marking one of the most significant antitrust challenges the company has faced on British soil.
The case centers on a straightforward, if painful, allegation: Google used its grip on mobile search to inflate advertising costs, and UK consumers ended up footing the bill every time they bought something through a business that ran Google search ads.
What the lawsuit actually claims
The appointed class representative is Nikki Stopford, with legal advisory firm Hausfeld guiding the action. The claim covers UK consumers aged 16 and above who used Google’s search advertising ecosystem, either directly or indirectly, to purchase goods and services.
The core theory of harm is a classic pass-through argument. Businesses paid inflated prices for Google search ads because Google had monopoly pricing power, and those businesses passed the extra cost onto shoppers in the form of higher prices. The consumers, not the advertisers, absorbed the real damage.
Opt-out collective actions are relatively new in UK competition law, and this one is notable for its scale. An opt-out structure means UK consumers are automatically included in the claim unless they actively choose to remove themselves, which tends to produce much larger claimant pools than opt-in alternatives.
The tribunal’s decision to certify the case came around November 25-26, 2024, overriding Google’s arguments that the action should not proceed.
Google’s history with antitrust regulators
The European Commission fined Google €2.4 billion in 2017 over its comparison shopping practices. Additional EU fines followed in subsequent years covering Android and AdSense.
In the United States, the Department of Justice won a landmark ruling in 2024 finding that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search and search advertising.
A related UK claim, filed by Or Brook Class Representative Limited, was registered on April 16, 2025, alleging comparable abuses by Google.
Google has consistently denied wrongdoing in its search business, arguing that its dominance reflects product quality rather than anticompetitive conduct, and that search advertising markets are competitive.
What this means for Google and the broader tech landscape
The UK’s digital markets regulatory environment has been tightening, with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act giving the Competition and Markets Authority new tools to designate firms with strategic market status and impose conduct requirements. The Stopford lawsuit operates through private litigation rather than the regulatory route, but both tracks are moving simultaneously.