Canada's Competition Tribunal issued a confidentiality order on August 12, 2026, in Rave Inc. v. Apple Canada Inc. and Apple Inc. — a procedural step, not a ruling on the merits, but one that keeps a 12-person Hamilton, Ontario startup's antitrust case against Apple moving toward a hearing on whether it can proceed at all.
Rave makes a watch-party app that lets people on different devices — iPhone, Android, Windows — stream video in sync. Apple pulled it from the App Store in 2025. Apple says the removal followed "repeated guideline violations," including complaints involving pirated content and child sexual abuse material. Rave calls that explanation pretextual, arguing in its May 7, 2026 leave application that Apple's real objective was to eliminate a competitor to SharePlay, the synced-viewing feature Apple built into FaceTime in 2021. Rave says it does not expect to survive without access to Apple's users, and is seeking $25 million in damages plus treble Apple's alleged anticompetitive profits, alongside an order restoring the app to iOS. It has filed parallel actions in the United States, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Russia — five jurisdictions in total.
Why This Case Exists At All
Until recently, a dispute like Rave's mostly couldn't reach the Competition Tribunal. Abuse-of-dominance claims under section 79 of the Competition Act were the exclusive domain of the Commissioner of Competition; private companies had no direct route to sue. That changed with 2024 amendments to section 103.1, which opened section 79 (and section 90.1, on anti-competitive agreements) to private leave applications — both from directly affected businesses and, via a new "public interest" gateway, from parties without a direct commercial stake.
The Tribunal has already shown it will not treat that gateway as a formality. In its first decision applying the new public-interest standard — Martin v. Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Canada Corporation, Apple Inc. and Apple Canada Inc., decided in January 2026 — the Tribunal denied leave to an individual game developer challenging Google-Apple search-default arrangements. It laid out a three-part test: a substantial and genuine dispute with a realistic chance of success, a genuine and continuing interest in the issue, and a credible plan to actually litigate the case — evidence, experts, resources. The applicant failed on the second and third prongs.
Rave's position looks different. As a competing business alleging direct commercial harm from a specific act — removal from the App Store — it is closer to the "affected business" leave threshold than to Martin's public-interest test for outside parties, and it arrives with a functioning product, a paper trail of the removal, and litigation already underway in four other countries. That does not guarantee leave will be granted; it means Rave's case tests a different, arguably sturdier, part of the same reform.
Apple's Defense Deserves a Fair Hearing
Before concluding Apple is in the wrong, it's worth stating Apple's case plainly: platforms that host third-party software have a legitimate — arguably obligatory — interest in policing content, and CSAM complaints are about as serious a trigger for removal as exists. An app store that hesitates to pull software over child-safety flags because the developer might later cry antitrust would be making the wrong trade. If Apple's stated reasons are accurate and the timeline supports them, this case should fail, and the Tribunal's leave-stage screening exists precisely to filter out claims that don't hold up once tested against evidence rather than allegation.
The Proportionate View
That said, the asymmetry underlying this dispute is real and worth taking seriously. Two companies — Apple and Google — control effectively all mobile app distribution. A removal decision that might be a minor compliance matter for a platform with billions of users can be existential for a twelve-person developer with no other channel to reach an install base. When a platform's dispute-resolution process is opaque and its content-moderation rationale doubles as a convenient reason to sideline a feature competitor, the conflict of interest is structural, not incidental — and it's exactly the kind of asymmetry that abuse-of-dominance law under section 79 was built to address when a firm's conduct isn't explained by superior competitive performance.
The right answer isn't to make it easy for any aggrieved developer to drag Apple into the Tribunal, nor to treat platform content-moderation calls as automatically immune from scrutiny. It's the structure Parliament actually built in 2024: a leave stage that requires a genuine, evidenced dispute before a case proceeds, calibrated by Martin to block strategic or thin claims while leaving room for ones with real substance. Rave's application, now moving through that gate with active discovery-adjacent procedure like the August 12 confidentiality order, is the system's first real test against a company with an actual competing product, a documented removal, and a plausible SharePlay-competition motive to litigate rather than merely allege. Where that test lands should turn on the facts Apple and Rave each put before the Tribunal — not on priors about big tech or small developers.