August 24, 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:

• Canada’s flight attendant strike saga shows the power of monopsony in labour markets
• A U.S. judge requires Amazon to disclose its web of self-interested research funding
• Meta is once again caught misleading advertisers and fudging the numbers on its platform

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Now let’s dive in.

Monopsony at 20,000 Feet

This week, the union representing 10,000 flight attendants reached a tentative agreement with the Air Canada, securing wins on issues such as pay while flights are still on the tarmac and wage increase in the coming years. The deal avoids a strike that was set to continue even after the government forced flight attendants back to work, likely in response to pressure from Air Canada. While union leaders are clear that the deal represented a compromise, the saga was an important reminder of the power of labour as a counterweight to monopoly.

It was also a reminder of the role that monopsony plays in the markets for the labour of Canadians. Whereas a monopoly refers to a single powerful seller of a good or service, monopsony is a situation where a dominant buyer holds the power. With a combined share of nearly 80%, Air Canada and WestJet form an effective duopoly in the market for Canadian air travel. But beyond their monopoly on air travel services, two carriers also function as monopsonists in the market for specialized labour like pilots, mechanics and flight attendants. Monopsony can be particularly problematic in labour markets, resulting in lower wages, unfair treatment, and restrictions on worker mobility.

When competition policy recognizes the harms that monopsony can have on workers, it can be a powerful ally to labour law. It wasn’t always this way, but Canada’s competition policy has made recent pro-worker moves thanks to the pressure of organizations like CAMP. As of 2022, the Competition Act now explicitly prohibits wage-fixing and no-poaching agreements, and in 2024 the Competition Act was amended to include the effects on labour when analyzing a potentially harmful merger. The right for workers to strike will always be an important tool in balancing the power of employees and employers, but other policy areas like competition can be pointed in the same direction to ensure workers get a fair deal.

Big Tech Funds Its Own Facts

Earlier this month, a U.S. federal judge ordered Amazon to disclose its network of funding of academic and think tank research, research that could be relied on to determine critical antitrust cases. Every year companies like Amazon throw millions of dollars at researchers across a range of subjects. When these financial connections are disclosed, we can judge whether to believe its conclusions to be independent of funder interests. But when these connections are not disclosed, we can presume a false sense of objectivity for work with ulterior financial motivations.

This is especially problematic when we have so many examples of Big Tech’s financial generosity coming with strings attached. Google’s influence on the prominent U.S. think tank New America resulted in the firing of researchers who criticized their monopoly. Meta has been accused of using financial and in-kind donations to influence the research agendas of universities. Canada is no exception. In 2023, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law was forced to returned an undisclosed donation of $600,000 from Amazon that was intended to influence the competition policy conversation in Canada in the e-commerce giant’s favour.

Enforcing competition law requires deep analysis of markets and complex industry dynamics, and judges depend research that can be secretly shaped by industry to guide their decisions. When the interests funding this research are not disclosed, we are unable to judge the effect of that funding on the outcomes of the work. This is one reason why CAMP discloses all donors above $5,000 on our About Us page. That the decision to force Amazon to disclose its research funding is a novel outcome shows us how far we have to go in understanding the reach of Big Tech’s influence.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Perez, Substack writers can now direct US readers to (often cheaper) web-based subscriptions on iOS(Techcrunch)
• Alford, What I saw inside Pam Bondi’s DOJ: Faux-MAGA lobbyists trample populism (UnHerd)
• Azeem, Mosqueda, Qadri and Brawley, As Progressive Elected Officials, We Choose both Economic Populism and Abundance (The Nation)

False Advertising: Meta Caught Lying to Advertisers, Again

This week, a whistleblower formerly employed at Meta filed a complaint to a UK court alleging that the company promoted its Shop Ads program using deceptive practices, including counting taxes and shipping fees as revenue, inflating ad auction bids, and applying undisclosed discounts. The outcome? Advertisers were given an inflated picture of how their ads on the platform were performing.

When parties misrepresent the value of advertising campaigns to advertisers, it’s called ad fraud. This kind of systematic misrepresentation is difficult to ferret out without whistleblowers because companies Meta are effectively checking their own homework. Meta has control over how results on their products are reported to advertisers, and subtle differences in how results are calculated may be invisible to advertisers. This is not the first time the company has been called out for inflating advertiser numbers, with the company settling a lawsuitover similar conduct related to Facebook videos in 2019.

This is not just a Meta problem either. Google also ran afoul of is advertisers when Adalytics revealed its TrueView advertising service, which guaranteed high quality ad space on high quality “vetted partners,” was pushing those ads into bottom of the barrel advertising spaces. These include the unskippable, display-crowding, auto-playing schlock on websites generally unfit for human consumption. While advertisers are rightly frustrated by the opacity and deception of these platforms, where else will they go? Without cracking open the online ad monopoly, advertisers will continue to put up with this deceptive conduct so long as giants like Meta and Google are the only game in town.

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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