Britain’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has cleared an opt-out consumer class action against Apple and Amazon to proceed, but only for the part of the claim that covers purchases made on Amazon’s UK marketplace. The tribunal certified the Amazon leg of the case on Monday and refused certification for the much larger portion covering Apple products bought from Apple’s own stores, its website and other retailers. Reuters reports the certified portion is valued by the claimant at between £289 million and £306 million including interest, roughly USD 383 million to USD 406 million at about 1.33 dollars to the pound.
In short
- The Competition Appeal Tribunal certified one leg of the claim on September 28, 2026, covering new Apple and Beats products bought through Amazon’s UK marketplace, and refused the leg covering purchases from Apple directly and from other retailers.
- The claim targets agreements dated October 31, 2018 under which, the claimant alleges, Amazon restricted independent retailers from listing Apple products on its marketplace while Apple gave Amazon preferential wholesale terms on units Amazon sold itself.
- Certification is not a finding of liability. It decides only whether the claims can be pursued collectively, and both companies have rejected the allegations: Apple says the arrangement was aimed at counterfeits, and Amazon calls the remaining claim without merit.
- The funding terms were cut, not just the claim size. The tribunal required revised funding that excludes costs from the earlier failed proceedings, trimming stakeholders’ success-related entitlement to about £92 million from £128 million, and capped the class representative’s pay at £170 an hour and £750 a day.
- For marketplace operators the practical lesson is documentary. Brand-protection programs that have the side effect of clearing independent resellers off a marketplace now carry a live UK collective-action risk, and the contemporaneous rationale is what will be litigated.
What did the Competition Appeal Tribunal decide on September 28?
The tribunal, sitting as a panel chaired by Mrs Justice Kelyn Bacon with two tribunal members, issued a split certification decision in JLP A&A Class Representative Limited v Apple Inc. and Others. The proposed class representative is Justin Le Patourel, acting through JLP A&A Class Representative Limited, with Hausfeld & Co LLP as claimant counsel. The claim was filed in December 2025 and a summary of the collective proceedings claim form was published by the tribunal in March 2026.
The certified portion is a collective proceedings order on an opt-out basis, meaning eligible UK consumers are included by default unless they actively opt out. Certification was made subject to conditions on the funding arrangements and on the class representative’s remuneration, which the claimant must now satisfy. Reuters reports the tribunal declined to certify the broader claim covering products bought from Apple’s website, Apple’s physical stores and third-party retailers other than Amazon.
The legal basis is the Chapter I prohibition of the UK Competition Act 1998, with Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union applying to conduct before the end of the Brexit transition period. That dual basis matters because the alleged agreements date from October 2018, when EU competition law still applied directly in the United Kingdom. It gives the claimant two routes to the same conclusion on the same facts.
Why the Amazon leg survived
According to reporting on the judgment, the tribunal described the Amazon-marketplace theory of harm as plausible, credible and grounded in the facts. The causal chain there is short and legible: if independent resellers were removed from a specific marketplace, the prices visible to shoppers on that marketplace would plausibly rise. The claimant does not have to prove that chain at certification, only that it is coherent enough to be tried collectively.
That short chain is also why the Amazon leg is the smaller of the two in money terms. It captures only the subset of buyers who transacted on Amazon’s UK store during the claim period, not every UK Apple buyer. The trade-off the claimant now lives with is a narrower class in exchange for a case that reaches trial.
Why the wider claim was refused
The off-Amazon leg required a considerably longer argument. To recover for someone who bought a MacBook in an Apple store or from a high-street electronics retailer, the claimant had to show that removing discounters from Amazon raised prices across the whole UK retail channel for Apple hardware. Reporting on the judgment indicates the tribunal found that causal link rested on a more complex and speculative theory of harm.
The practical effect is a large reduction in exposure. The claim as filed in December 2025 was pitched at more than £900 million (about USD 1.20 billion at about 1.33 dollars to the pound), and Apple’s counsel characterized it as £899 million at the certification hearing in early July 2026. What survives is roughly a third of that.
| Leg of the claim | What it covers | Tribunal outcome | Reported value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon marketplace | New Apple and Beats products bought through Amazon’s UK store | Certified, opt-out, subject to funding and remuneration conditions | £289m to £306m including interest (about USD 383m to USD 406m) |
| Apple direct and other retailers | Purchases from Apple’s website, Apple retail stores and third-party retailers | Certification refused | Balance of the £900m claim as filed (about USD 1.20bn total) |
What was the October 2018 agreement between Apple and Amazon?
The conduct at the center of the claim is a pair of commercial agreements the claimant dates to October 31, 2018. On the public record, the arrangement made Amazon an authorized channel for Apple hardware, allowing Amazon’s retail business to stock iPhones, iPads and Macs directly at scale. Amazon had previously carried Apple hardware largely through a long tail of independent resellers on its marketplace.
The claimant’s case, as set out by Hausfeld when the proceedings were filed, has two limbs. The first is that Amazon restricted which independent retailers could offer Apple-branded products on its marketplace. The second is that Apple provided Amazon with preferential wholesale pricing on units Amazon sold as a first-party retailer.
Taken together, the claimant argues, the effect was to strip discounted third-party listings out of the largest online shopping surface in the country and replace them with a single well-supplied incumbent. Apple has publicly framed the arrangement differently, saying it was intended to tackle counterfeit products and that it does not limit third parties. Amazon has said the remaining claim is without merit.
Both characterizations can be true as descriptions of intent and still leave a competition question open. UK competition law looks at effects as well as objects, which is why the documentary record of how the program was designed and administered is likely to carry more weight at trial than either company’s public framing of it.
What happened to independent Apple resellers on Amazon UK
The claimant alleges that by January 2019, almost all independent retailers of Apple products had been forced off the Amazon marketplace. That is a fast transition by marketplace standards, and it is the empirical anchor of the certified claim. If the timing holds up in evidence, it gives the claimant a natural before-and-after window for price analysis.
The product scope is broad within Apple’s hardware range. The claim covers iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, Apple TVs, HomePods, Apple Watches, AirPods and Beats headphones, along with ancillary accessories such as chargers, keyboards and mice. Accessories matter more than they look: they are the category where independent resellers historically competed hardest on price.
What the claimant must eventually show is not that listings disappeared but that prices paid went up as a result. That is an econometric exercise on Amazon UK transaction data, and it is the kind of exercise the tribunal has shown it will scrutinize closely at trial rather than at certification.
Who is in the certified class, and what is the claim worth?
As filed, the proposed class covered an estimated 28.9 million UK consumers who bought new Apple or Beats products between October 31, 2018 and December 15, 2025. Hausfeld indicated at filing that roughly 10 million of those consumers bought from Amazon. The certified class is drawn from that Amazon subset rather than the full 28.9 million.
On an opt-out basis, those consumers do not need to register to be part of the proceedings. They are in unless they opt out, and any eventual award or settlement would be distributed to the class rather than to individual claimants who signed up in advance. The claimant has published information for consumers on a dedicated official claim website covering eligibility and the opt-out route.
The headline damages number is the claimant’s own estimate, not a tribunal finding. Reuters reports the certified leg is valued between £289 million and £306 million including interest. On a class of roughly 10 million buyers, that implies an average recovery in the tens of pounds per consumer before costs, which is characteristic of the UK collective regime: the individual sums are small, and the deterrent effect sits in the aggregate.
The narrowing also changes what the claimant has to prove. A class defined by Amazon transactions can be reconstructed from Amazon’s own order records, which removes most of the identification problem that dogs consumer claims. The harder question shifts entirely to the counterfactual: what would Apple prices on Amazon UK have looked like had independent resellers stayed on the platform.
That counterfactual is where the case will be won or lost. The claimant will argue from the observed price distribution before October 2018 and from comparable categories where gating did not occur. The defendants will argue that Apple hardware prices track Apple’s own recommended retail pricing closely in every channel, and that discounting by independent resellers was thin to begin with.
Why the funding conditions matter more than the headline number
The tribunal did not simply shrink the claim. It attached conditions that reshape the economics of running it. Funding arrangements must be revised to exclude costs carried over from the earlier failed proceedings, and the tribunal set out limits on what the class representative can be paid.
On the reported figures, the revision reduces stakeholders’ success-related entitlement to about £92 million from about £128 million, or roughly USD 122 million from USD 170 million. Le Patourel’s own remuneration was capped at no more than £170 an hour, with a daily ceiling of £750, equivalent to about USD 226 an hour and USD 996 a day. Those are modest numbers for a case of this size, and they are a deliberate signal.
| Funding and remuneration term | As proposed | As conditioned by the tribunal |
|---|---|---|
| Stakeholder success entitlement | About £128m (about USD 170m) | About £92m (about USD 122m) |
| Costs of earlier failed proceedings | Included in the funding stack | Must be excluded |
| Class representative hourly rate | Higher rate proposed | Capped at £170 per hour (about USD 226) |
| Class representative daily cap | No stated cap | £750 per day (about USD 996) |
How does this compare with the claim the tribunal refused in January 2025?
This is the second attempt to bring these allegations as a UK collective action. The first was led by Christine Riefa, a consumer-law academic, and was valued at around USD 600 million. In January 2025 the tribunal refused to certify it, concluding that the proposed class representative did not satisfy the requirement to act fairly and adequately in the interests of class members.
Critically, that refusal was about the representative and the funding arrangements, not about the substance. Reporting at the time noted the tribunal took no issue with the underlying merits of the consumers’ claims. That distinction is what made a second attempt viable rather than futile.
The replacement of the class representative in December 2025 was therefore a targeted fix to a targeted defect. Le Patourel is a former Ofcom consumer policy lead and a certified class representative in a prior collective action, which addresses the fairness and adequacy question the first attempt failed. The tribunal’s decision to condition certification on funding revisions suggests it is still watching the same issue closely.
His track record is a double-edged qualification. Le Patourel was the class representative in Le Patourel v BT Group Plc, the first UK opt-out competition class action to reach a full trial on the merits. The tribunal unanimously dismissed that claim in December 2024, finding BT’s standalone fixed voice prices excessive but not unfair, and therefore no abuse of dominance.
| Case | Filed | Class | Claimed value | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Le Patourel v BT Group Plc | January 2021 | About 3.7m standalone fixed voice customers | £1.1bn before interest (about USD 1.46bn) | Dismissed on the merits, December 19, 2024 |
| Riefa v Apple and Amazon | 2023 | UK buyers of Apple products | About USD 600m | Certification refused, January 2025 |
| JLP A&A v Apple and Amazon | December 2025 | Proposed 28.9m UK buyers, about 10m via Amazon | Over £900m as filed (about USD 1.20bn) | Amazon leg certified September 28, 2026 |
| US Apple and Amazon class action | November 2022 | US purchasers of Apple devices | Not publicly quantified | Dismissed with leave to amend, September 2025 |
Is the US version of this case still alive?
A parallel US class action was filed in November 2022 by Hagens Berman in federal court in Seattle, alleging the same 2018 arrangement inflated prices for Apple devices. In September 2025 Judge Kymberly Evanson dismissed it, with plaintiffs permitted to file an amended complaint. The dismissal was reported to turn in part on the conduct of the plaintiffs’ lawyers rather than solely on the substance of the antitrust theory.
That leaves the two jurisdictions on different tracks. The UK claim now has a certified class and a route to trial on a narrowed theory; the US claim has to be repleaded before it can go anywhere. For Amazon this is a familiar pattern, running alongside the separate state-level pricing litigation where a California price-fixing case heading to trial tests adjacent questions about marketplace pricing policies.
The divergence is structurally interesting for retail counsel. UK opt-out certification produces a defined class and a quantified exposure early, before liability is resolved. US class practice typically resolves the pleading standard first and leaves class size contested for much longer.
What does the ruling mean for marketplace operators?
The immediate read is that a brand-protection agreement can be certified as an anticompetitive agreement in the United Kingdom without any regulator bringing a case first. There is no Competition and Markets Authority infringement decision underpinning this claim. It is a standalone private action, and it has cleared the procedural gate that historically stopped most of them.
That changes the risk calculus for platforms that operate gated categories. Marketplace operators run authorized-seller programs for legitimate reasons: counterfeits, safety compliance, warranty integrity and channel control on behalf of brands. The claim does not dispute that those reasons exist; it disputes whether the specific 2018 design went further than those reasons required.
Retail teams that have worked through how federal antitrust rules touch retail mergers in practice will recognize the shape of the problem. The legal exposure attaches not to the stated purpose of a program but to its demonstrable effect on the price shoppers pay. That is an evidentiary question, and it is answered from internal documents and transaction data.
The practical consequence is that the drafting and the administration of these programs now need to be defensible separately. A program can be written narrowly and administered broadly, and it is the administration record that a collective action will subpoena.
How the UK collective regime has shifted
The opt-out collective regime was created by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and for most of its first decade it produced procedural fights rather than outcomes. The BT claim was the first to reach a full merits judgment, nearly ten years after the regime came into force, and the defendant won. That history shaped a widespread assumption that certification was the hard part and the merits were harder still.
Both halves of that assumption are now being tested at once. Certification is clearly attainable for a well-framed marketplace claim, and the tribunal has shown it will trim funding economics as the price of passage rather than refuse outright. The defense playbook of contesting the representative and the funding stack still works, but it delays rather than ends a claim, as the two-attempt history here demonstrates.
Apple is also not facing only this claim in London. The tribunal’s own case register shows a separate collective action, ATT Collective Action Limited against Apple entities, registered on September 3, 2026. Defendants in consumer technology and retail should assume the UK is now a standing venue rather than an occasional one.
Which brands run the same playbook, and what changes for them?
Apple is not unusual in restricting who may resell its products on third-party marketplaces. Selective distribution is standard practice across premium consumer electronics, beauty, footwear and audio, and brand-gating programs on Amazon are widely used. Brands that have thought hard about selling premium products on marketplaces without cheapening the brand have usually arrived at some version of the same structure.
What this ruling does is separate two things that are often bundled together. Restricting unauthorized resellers to protect a brand is one thing. Pairing that restriction with preferential wholesale terms for the platform’s own retail arm is another, because it swaps a competitive set of sellers for a single favored one.
That second element is the part the claimant leans on hardest, and it is the part brands should isolate in their own arrangements. A selective distribution policy applied consistently to every channel looks different from one applied selectively in exchange for platform-specific commercial terms.
What sellers and brands should document now
The defensible position is a written, consistently applied authorization standard with objective criteria. Criteria that turn on verifiable things, such as provenance of stock, warranty handling capability and safety documentation, are easier to defend than criteria that turn on commercial convenience. Consistency across platforms matters as much as the content of the criteria.
Enforcement records are the second thing to keep. If a program exists to remove counterfeit and grey-market stock, the file should show counterfeit and grey-market findings, not a list of removals with no stated reason. Gaps in that file become the claimant’s best evidence.
The third item is a contemporaneous note of the commercial terms negotiated alongside any gating change. If wholesale pricing, retail media commitments or fulfillment terms moved at the same time as an authorization change, that coincidence will be reconstructed later by someone hostile. Better that the internal rationale exists in writing at the time.
Where does this sit in the wider pressure on Amazon?
The certified claim lands on a company already managing a dense stack of competition and consumer-protection matters across jurisdictions. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has pursued Amazon on multiple fronts, including the case in which the FTC sued Amazon over hidden ad auction surcharges. In Asia, Korea’s competition authority has been running a comparable marketplace investigation against Coupang.
The UK matter is distinctive because it is driven by private capital rather than by a regulator’s enforcement priorities. Litigation funders select cases on expected return, which means claim selection follows commercial logic rather than a published enforcement agenda. That makes the pipeline harder for defendants to anticipate.
It also means the tribunal’s funding conditions have systemic consequences. By cutting the stakeholder entitlement and capping the representative’s pay, the tribunal has reduced the expected return on this specific case. Funders reading the judgment will price the next marketplace claim accordingly.
What happens next, and on what timetable?
The immediate step is compliance with the conditions: the claimant must put revised funding arrangements and remuneration terms before the tribunal before the collective proceedings order takes effect. After that, the certified proceedings move into case management, disclosure and expert evidence on quantum. Both defendants retain the option to seek permission to appeal aspects of the certification decision.
The realistic timetable is long. The BT claim took just under four years from filing to judgment, with an eight-week trial. Applying a comparable arc to a claim filed in December 2025 puts a merits judgment somewhere around 2029 or 2030, absent settlement.
Settlement is the more likely resolution path, and it is worth noting how UK consumer redress tends to be delivered in practice. Distribution mechanics matter: in the parallel consumer-protection world, the approach taken when the FTC raised Amazon Prime refunds to $200 shows how automated payouts to an identified buyer population can be executed without a claims process. An Amazon-only class defined by transaction records is well suited to the same treatment.
There is also a disclosure dimension worth flagging for both companies’ finance teams. A certified opt-out class with a claimant-stated value above USD 380 million is the kind of contingency that gets described in filings, even where the defendant assesses the probability of loss as remote. The certification date, not the filing date, is usually the trigger for that reassessment.
For retailers watching this as a precedent rather than as an Apple story, the date to note is not the eventual judgment. It is September 28, 2026, the day a standalone private claim about marketplace seller restrictions cleared certification in the United Kingdom without a regulator having found anything first.
Frequently asked questions
Does the tribunal’s decision mean Apple and Amazon broke competition law?
No. Certification decides only whether claims can be pursued collectively on behalf of a class. It does not decide whether either company infringed competition law, and it does not decide whether consumers suffered any loss. Apple has said it strongly disagrees with the allegations, and Amazon has said the remaining claim is without merit.
Who is included in the certified class?
The certified leg covers UK consumers who bought new Apple or Beats products through Amazon’s UK store during the claim period. As filed, the wider proposed class covered an estimated 28.9 million UK consumers who bought between October 31, 2018 and December 15, 2025, of whom Hausfeld indicated roughly 10 million bought via Amazon. Consumers who bought only from Apple directly or from other retailers fall outside the certified leg.
Do eligible consumers need to sign up?
No. The proceedings are certified on an opt-out basis, so UK-domiciled class members are included automatically unless they choose to opt out. The claimant publishes eligibility and opt-out information on a dedicated claim website.
How much could an individual consumer receive?
Nothing is payable unless the claim succeeds or settles. On the claimant’s own valuation of £289 million to £306 million including interest, spread across a class of roughly 10 million buyers, the arithmetic implies tens of pounds per person on average before costs and funder entitlements. Actual distribution would depend on purchase volume and on the terms of any judgment or settlement.
Why did the tribunal refuse the larger part of the claim?
The off-Amazon leg required the claimant to show that removing discount resellers from one marketplace raised Apple prices across the entire UK retail channel. Reporting on the judgment indicates the tribunal found that causal chain rested on a more complex and speculative theory of harm than the Amazon-specific claim, which it described as plausible, credible and grounded in the facts.
What is the significance of the funding conditions?
They change the expected return on the case. The tribunal required revised funding that excludes costs carried over from the earlier failed proceedings, which on reported figures reduces stakeholders’ success-related entitlement to about £92 million from about £128 million. It also capped the class representative’s remuneration at £170 an hour and £750 a day. Funders assessing future marketplace claims will price against those terms.
Is there an equivalent case in the United States?
A class action making similar allegations was filed in Seattle federal court in November 2022 and dismissed in September 2025, with leave to file an amended complaint. It is not currently proceeding on the merits, so the UK claim is the more advanced of the two.
What should marketplace sellers and brands do in response?
Review authorized-reseller and brand-gating programs for two things: whether the authorization criteria are objective and consistently applied across platforms, and whether any gating change coincided with platform-specific commercial terms such as preferential wholesale pricing. Keep enforcement records that state the reason for each removal. The evidentiary file, not the policy document, is what a collective action will examine.
When is this likely to be resolved?
Not soon. The certified proceedings still need a collective proceedings order to take effect, then case management, disclosure and expert quantum evidence, with appeals possible on certification. The comparable BT collective action took just under four years from filing to a merits judgment, which points to the end of the decade for this claim absent a settlement.