September 21, 2025Welcome to Letters from CAMP, a newsletter on anti-monopoly activity in Canada and abroad, brought to you by the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. In this instalment we have:
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Why is Ticketmaster Trying to Ruin Toronto?Other than telecoms, there are few more hated monopolies in Canada than Ticketmaster. With a grip on ticketing and venue services, anyone attending a live event in the last decade knows the displeasure of navigating the company’s walled garden. Hidden fees, ticket scalping bots, and clunky user experience are all hallmarks of Ticketmaster’s monopoly. While customer suffering has been longstanding, recently the company has amped up its efforts to ruin entertainment in the city of Toronto. This week it was announced that Ticketmaster, through its Live Nation subsidiary, would be closing the Velvet Underground, a storied Toronto venue that has been providing much needed performance space for nearly three decades. But the company’s reach extends to almost every live entertainment venue in Toronto, with the expected results. Ticketing services for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), provided by Ticketmaster, saw scalpers hoover up tickets en masse and resell them at ridiculous prices. The result? Movie fans who couldn’t stomach usurious prices missed out on films and while theatres for allegedly sold-out shows sat half empty. Why can’t Ticketmaster get a hold of the scalping bots on its platform? Because it’s too profitable to let them run wild. This week, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued the company for turning a blind eye to bots, triple dipping on consumer fees, and deceiving customers about the true cost of tickets. The root of this problem goes to the 2010 decision to allow Ticketmaster and Live Nation to combine into the entertainment behemoth we know today. By creating an integrated ticketing and venue operation, the seeds for one of the most detested monopolies in North America was born. The recent U.S. scrutiny is not its first tangle with regulators, with the company settling a deceptive marketing case for the same conduct with Canada’s Competition Bureau in 2019, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) suing the company in 2024. But another round of investigation is unlikely to change the stripes of this company. Ticketmaster’s continued conduct in the face of repeated regulatory scrutiny is a reminder that there is only one solution to monopoly: break it up. 📰 CAMP in the News 📰One Jump Ahead of the Bread (Settlement) LineBetween 2001 and 2015, almost the entire Canadian bread market conspired to raise the price of packaged bread products, putting the squeeze on unsuspecting Canadians. While the Competition Bureau’s case against the cartel continues, last year Loblaws and George Weston Ltd. agreed to pay out $500 million to settle a separate class action lawsuit brought to compensate Canadians for the harms of the price-fixing cartel. As of this week, applications to receive compensation flowing from the class action settlement are now open, and CAMP encourages anyone who bought bread over the past two decades to claim the $25 they are owed before the application closes on December 12th. While $25 in our pockets is nice, the $500 million settlement is crumbs compared to the true cost of 15 years of gouging on a staple food. Some estimates put the cost to Canadians at nearly $5 billion, which would translate to over $350 per household in Canada. Other grocers alleged to have participated including Giant Tiger, Sobeys, Metro and Walmart are still amid legal proceedings and have yet to see penalties since the cartel was exposed in 2017, raising important questions about the speed of Canada’s competition law. Canada’s consolidated grocery sector makes this kind of price fixing possible, with big businesses able to control prices in an environment where Canadians have little choice. The bread saga also raises the question of just how deep down the grocery aisle this conduct goes. If grocers could distort bread prices, why should we believe they won’t do the same for other grocery staples? 📚 What We’re Reading 📚
FTC Turns Its Spotlight on AI ChatbotsThe FTC has launched an inquiry into the practices of seven companies that offer AI chatbots, looking into how the businesses manage the use of their products by minors, and the risks that this use can bring. As chatbots increasingly become part of the social lives of young people, acting as conversation partners, friends and even romantic partners, the safety of these relationships is in question. Earlier this week, U.S. Senators heard from parents who had lost children to suicide after forming attachments with AI Chatbots, part of a bipartisan push to address the growing sense of risk arising from how companies are courting the engagement of young people with chatbots. At the heart of the problem is the fact that chatbots are products offered by companies, not companions. No matter what their appearances on the surface, their behaviors are programmed to serve the interests of their designers: to keep people engaged on their platform. This is a grim extension of the business models of social media companies, where more engagement means more data collected, and more opportunities to serve advertising. Creating emotional dependence on AI chatbots creates dependence on the platforms themselves, and companies like Meta have already been lambasted for exploiting sensuality and a need for attachment to keep people talking. Although companies offering AI chatbots provide basic features to allow parents to control their child’s use of technology, these tokens are a distraction from the need for democratic input into the guardrails around this technology. We have ceded control of our social lives to social media companies under the false idea that these platforms were simply a reflection of our social networks and interests. We can’t let this corporate wild west approach extend even further into the development of the most vulnerable in our society. If you have any monopoly tips or stories you’d like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca
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