October 12, 2025

Welcome 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:

• Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada comes out against Canada’s concentrated banking sector
• Book Launch! Anti-monopoly champion Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It​
• Brazil leads the way in regaining control over critical digital infrastructure

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Now let’s dive in.

Bank of Canada Senior Leadership Calls Out Banking Oligopoly

In a speech to the Canadian Club this week, Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers said that Canada’s banking oligopoly is holding the country back. Where have we heard that before?, To remedy the situation, Rogers put forward several ideas to encourage competition: regulated integration of crypto currencies into banking systems, finally getting serious on open banking to give people more control over their financial data and make it easier to switch banks, and finishing the job on the real-time payments system that would cut out banks as middlemen for all transactions in Canada.

The message from Rogers is a welcome recognition of what CAMP has been saying all along. Canada’s highly concentrated banking oligopoly is a serious drag on our economy that primarily excels at squeezing Canadians. Now that the call is coming from inside the house, criticism of Canada’s banking system is impossible to ignore. While Rogers framed her remarks in the wake of the worsening relationship with the U.S., the harms of Canada’s banking oligopoly long predate the current American administration. The comfortable and conservative position of the Big Banks has left our economy sluggish and less able to adapt to the critical juncture we now face.

While it’s good to see senior leadership of the Bank of Canada coming around, the Big Banks won’t go down without a fight. The same companies that have spent years slow rolling the release of open banking and the shift to modern payment systems are the first to slap the Team Canada logo on their foreheads. We need a movement that opens the door to greater competition and ensures the interests of savers and borrowers are protected. Making it easier to switch banks only works if there are better alternatives, and without stopping harmful consolidation and changing the rules around how new banks are created, there won’t be much more on offer. CAMP is glad to see Senior Deputy Governor Rogers on board, but the real fight is still to come.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• ​CanadaStack meets Eurostack: How Canada and Europe can align on digital sovereignty (Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Canadian SHEILD Institute, and the Dais)

Book Launch! Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Nostalgia is a hot commodity these days. Too often the distance of time papers over the very real problems we and the ones who came before us faced in the past. Objects in mirror were worse than they appear. But when it comes to the history of the internet, there’s a real historical and economic case to be made that things were once better, and we now find ourselves on the path of steady decline. Years ago, author Cory Doctorow put a name to this phenomenon: enshittification.

This week, Doctorow releases his new book on the topic, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Doctorow is a familiar and prolific champion of the value of democratic control over technology. Unsurprisingly, he is also a leading anti-monopoly thinker, unmasking the monopolization of creative industries and what we can do to break away from this path.

The good old days of the internet are gone, dimly recognizable among the corporate walled platforms we’ve been corralled into over the last two decades. While we may have already reached peak social media, it’s a long way down to the bottom. Before creating a new future for ourselves, we need to figure out how we got here. To find out, in detail why the internet sucks now and what we might be able to do about it, grab yourself a copy of Enshittification.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Parys, Private equity is swallowing up Canada’s mom-and-pop shops (The Globe & Mail)
• Riehl, Canadian cloud providers unite to launch sovereign cloud offering for government (BetaKit)
• Blit, Canada’s next great project must be to build an AI nation (Policy Options)

Brazil Shows Us What Digital Governance Looks Like

Last month, as part of the Digital Brazil Agenda, President Lula announced a suite of ambitious new laws designed to reclaim the country’s digital sovereignty. Capitalizing on years of preparation and development of Brazil’s digital infrastructure and regulatory capacity, the laws update Brazil’s child protection frameworks for games, social networks and other apps, create a tax structure to stimulate the development of domestic digital infrastructure, empower their data protection authority, and proposes significant improvements to the regulation of competition in digital markets. Taken together, the agenda represents one of the most comprehensive assertions of sovereignty in the digital realm.

Because of our anti-monopoly mandate, we’re most interested in Brazil’s proposed changes to its competition laws. The Digital Fair Competition Bill creates a means of designating “platforms of specific relevance,” and imposes on them responsibilities including transparency, interoperability, and non-discrimination. This is a similar approach to the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper” designation, as well as the U.K.’s “strategic market status.” These designations recognize the realities of digital commerce today, where global platforms have become unavoidable intermediaries for all kinds of social, commercial, and political activity. Brazil’s approach is novel in that it not only regulates the conduct of these giants but also stimulates the development of domestic alternatives.

When countries around the world are reconsidering their efforts to control digital giants, Brazil shows us what a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to digital infrastructure and regulation can look like. Brazil is not new to this. The country has been a leader in digital governance and digital rights, introducing a nationwide Digital ID system, and even building a local payment system, pix, as an alternative to foreign payments monopolies. As the U.S. shifts from reining in to boosting the power of Big Tech, Brazil is stepping up as a source of real governance in our digital world.

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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