Google's Play Catalogue Access Program went live in the United States on July 22, 2026, letting approved third-party Android app stores plug into Google Play's catalog and cutting Google's commission on many transactions from 30% to as low as 10%. It is the concrete, developer-facing output of the long-running Epic Games v. Google fight: Google and Epic jointly withdrew their dispute over the injunction's implementation on July 15, 2026, clearing the way for the changes Google's own developer notice confirms took effect that week. The catch, as MobileSyrup reported, is that every part of it is scoped to "developers serving users in the United States." Asked directly for a Canadian timeline, Google Canada told the outlet it "has no details to share."
A bigger case, no faster remedy
The irony is that Canada is not a bystander to Google antitrust enforcement — it is running the more consequential case. In November 2024, the Commissioner of Competition filed an abuse-of-dominance application against Google Canada Corporation and Google LLC over its advertising technology stack, alleging Google tied its ad tools together, gave its own products preferential access to ad inventory, and dictated terms to publishers and rivals across the online ad supply chain. As Norton Rose Fulbright's analysis of the case lays out, the Bureau is seeking administrative monetary penalties of up to 3% of Google's worldwide gross revenue — the first real test of that expanded cap since it was legislated in June 2022.
Google tried to have the penalty provision struck down as unconstitutional, arguing the exposure could reach roughly C$91 billion and therefore amounted to a criminal-scale punishment requiring Charter protections. On March 3, 2026, the Competition Tribunal rejected that argument. Justice Andrew D. Little found the C$91-billion figure "hypothetical at best" and ruled the penalty is "regulatory, not penal, in purpose and effect" — full detail on the reasoning is in ppc.land's writeup of the decision. Acting Commissioner of Competition Jeanne Pratt called it a win: "Our case against Google continues. We continue to stand by our investigative findings that, through its anti-competitive conduct, Google has been able to entrench its dominance," she said in the Bureau's official statement. Google filed a notice of appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal on March 13, 2026, so the constitutional question isn't fully closed even as the underlying liability case proceeds toward a bifurcated hearing.
Two different remedies, two different logics
It's worth being fair to why these tracks are separate. The U.S. changes exist because a jury found Google violated antitrust law specifically in app distribution and in-app payments, and a federal injunction ordered a specific fix — catalog sharing and a lower commission floor. Canada's case is about a different market (ad tech, not app stores) and hasn't reached a liability finding at all; the Tribunal has only cleared a procedural obstacle. Demanding Google extend a U.S. court's app-store remedy to Canada conflates two unrelated proceedings, and a company facing a live C$91-billion exposure in one jurisdiction has no legal obligation to volunteer concessions in another where no violation has been found. That the Bureau's case is proceeding methodically — surviving a constitutional challenge before a single liability finding — is what evidence-based enforcement is supposed to look like, and it deserves credit for not front-running its own record.
Where that argument runs out
But the app-store gap is still a real cost, and it's one the current legal architecture does nothing to close. Canadian developers pay a 30% Play Store commission and get no rival marketplace access while their American counterparts pay as little as 10% and can list on competing stores — for the identical app, sold by the identical company, with no Canadian court finding required to justify the difference. That asymmetry exists purely because Canada relies on litigation-triggered remedies rather than an ex-ante rulebook like the EU's Digital Markets Act, and litigation moves at the pace of the slowest constitutional appeal, not the pace of a competitive market. The ad-tech case, win or lose, will not touch app-store commissions at all.
The better fix isn't to import DMA-style pre-emptive obligations wholesale — that trades a slow but evidence-tested process for a fast but blunt one, and Canada's own case shows the slow process can still produce real deterrence. It's for the Bureau to treat the app-store gap as a live enforcement gap in its own right, not an artifact to be waited out. Nothing stops a Canadian abuse-of-dominance inquiry into Play Store commissions specifically, using the same section 79 tools already validated in the ad-tech ruling. Until that happens, Canadian developers are subsidizing a remedy they don't get.