Start with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the only part of the number anyone can check. The filing quotes £2 billion and $2.7 billion in the same breath, which implies about $1.35 to the pound [1]; spread across the five years of prompts the claim covers [15], that is roughly £400 million a year of alleged harm [2]; and split across a class described only as thousands of UK developers [2], ten thousand members would average £200,000 each [5]. That is serious money for a two-person studio and immaterial to Apple. It is also a number built by a method nobody outside ATT Collective Action Limited has seen, since how the claimants reached the figure is not known [14].
The alleged mechanism is narrower than the headline suggests. It is not that a prompt exists, but that third-party apps had to secure permission twice before tracking users across other apps and websites while Apple's in-house services carried no equivalent restriction [3], with the claimed result that ad-funded developers pay more to acquire users and collect less for their inventory [5]. Apple's answer is factual rather than philosophical: its own apps skip the prompt because they do not collect the data the prompt refers to, which in its view leaves the field level [7]. That defence is testable, which is exactly its risk, because testing it means putting Apple's own ad data flows in front of a tribunal.
Germany's competition authority already ruled on a different axis, finding that the prompt design produced more consent outcomes for Apple than for rivals and demanding changes [10]. Both things can be true at once: Apple may not gather the cross-app identifier the prompt governs, and the prompt may still have moved consent share toward Apple. Italy's €98.6 million and France's €150 million sum to €248.6 million of ATT fines so far [3], and even valuing a pound at a euro the London claim asks for about eight times that total [4] - with France, notably, demanding no changes when it fined [9] while Italy demanded them [8].
The case can go a few ways from here. Certification narrows the class or kills it, which is where most CAT claims are actually decided. Apple settles on prompt design and pays nothing, the pattern implied by the eight changes it has already agreed to in the EU [11]. Or the tribunal awards some fraction of £2 billion years out, and the calendar is unkind here: the same tribunal's $4.1 billion iCloud claim against Apple is not due to be heard until late 2028 [13], close to three years after this filing [6], and no ATT hearing date exists at all [12].
This is probably wrong, but I would price the cash recovery well below the headline and the disclosure well above it, because the useful output of the case is a documented account of what Apple's advertising business collects. Worth noting what Apple spends while this runs: privacy engineering allocated to jurisdiction-specific consent flows, in the EU, in Germany, and wherever Poland and Romania take their reviews [11], rather than to one prompt. What would prove the thesis wrong is a published methodology tying the £2 billion to measured spend that moved after April 2021 [4], or evidence that Apple's ads use the same cross-app signals the prompt governs - at which point the level-playing-field line stops being a defence [7].
