June 28, 2026

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 installment we have:

• The World Cup ticket resale markets leave fans stranded and looking for more than a refund
• The European Commission moves to regulate cloud providers AWS and Azure as “gatekeepers”
• How Canada’s legislative push puts privacy in question and competition in tension

If you enjoy Letters, please consider sharing and supporting CAMP.

​

Now let’s dive in.

Ticket Resale Fails at Scale

Researchers take note, the 2026 World Cup is shaping up to be a case study on monopolized markets and anti-consumer experiences in a league of its own. While fans watch football in record numbers, FIFA’s embrace of dynamic pricing has driven ticket prices to record highs. And then there’s resale. By infusing algorithms and speculation into ticketing, scalping and scamming has driven the ugly economics of the beautiful game into the spotlight. Now, many would-be attendees are finding the tickets they already paid a premium for failing to materialize, sometimes finding out hours or minutes before the game.

Resale markets are prime venues for abuse and deception. The issue at hand is known as “speculative ticketing,” where scalpers, anticipating that prices will drop right before a game, list tickets they don’t have in hand. Resale platforms, like Stubhub, take a cut from transactions they facilitate, holding the buyers’ money, but not the sellers’ tickets. This puts all the risk on consumers, with none of the guarantees. Aside from speculative ticketing, problems with ticket transfers using FIFA’s App meant problems getting tickets bought through resale platforms failed to appear. FIFA urged fans to use its official resale marketplace, where they take a 30% fee from every transaction, a flex of monopoly power that would make Ticketmaster blush.

The World Cup is a showcase of the incredible mess that is North America’s mass entertainment market. Protecting consumers from speculative ticketing is one way that authorities should intervene— if consumers pay for something, they should know if they’re paying for a ticket, or the possibility of a ticket. Resale platforms control these marketplaces, and they should have a stake in assuring resellers have the goods, and aren’t trying to game the system. But there’s a lot more to be done. Ontario took an important step in the right direction when it capped resale prices and increased penalties, but it needs to make sure these are enforced, and don’t increase the monopoly power of firms like Ticketmaster. For those types, regulators should be handing out red cards.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• Eaves, McCord, An Open Society Needs an Open Market: The Compute Problem Cities, Regions, and Nations Share (Reboot Democracy)
• Seglins, StubHub World Cup ticket cancellations prompt calls for investigations, legal action (CBC News)
• Moscrop, How Loblaw Kills Off Competition without Anyone Noticing (The Walrus)

Europe bets on cloud competition

This week the European Commission moved to designate two of the world’s biggest cloud computing providers, Amazon and Microsoft as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act. This major regulatory move is a long time coming, and shows the EU is taking the relationship of competition and digital sovereignty seriously, by targeting the financial and technical mechanisms that these companies use to keep their clients locked in and dependent. It’s no surprise that some of the potential interventions closely track CAMP’s recommendations in our Parting Clouds report.

Canada should keep a close eye on how the Europeans and others are tying the need for domestic computing capacity to competitive markets. Canada’s AI strategy has committed two billion dollars to building sovereign infrastructure, but whether that buys Canada out of its digital dependence is a dubious proposition. No amount of spending will matter if public and private sector organizations can’t choose who they work with. Right now, Big Cloud’s power is entrenched, and their clients are locked in. They are prevented from switching by financial costs like egress fees, and technical hurdles that mean rebuilding key systems and retraining staff. As AI becomes more integrated with these technologies, this will get even worse.

The original promise of the cloud was a shared digital infrastructure that could treat storage and computing power as a utility, allowing specialized providers to handle storage and networking. Over time, it has become a way for US big tech to control the critical infrastructure for commerce and governments rely on, and how innovation works around the world. If we want domestic options to be viable at all, interoperability and portability must be part of government’s strategy, and competition enforcement must discipline the market. Otherwise, Canada will never recover control over its digital destiny.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Nguyen, Walmart Rollbacks & Fragmented Reference Prices (The Division of Field Notes)
• Roy, Competition watchdog broadens probe into Empire’s use of property controls (The Globe and Mail)
• Bednar, McLeod, Corbett, Osborne, Tiessen and da Mota, Sovereign Compute: Options for Canada’s Digital Infrastructure (Canadian Shield Institute)

CAMP’s Privacy Summer

Heading into high summer and Canada day celebrations, Canadians have a few months to enjoy the sun, relax, and try to make sense of our government’s approach to digital regulations and privacy. On the one hand, Bill C-22, heading to the Senate in the fall, would require tech providers to retain metadata describing user activity and even weaken privacy-preserving technologies like encryption. On the other hand, Bill C-36 on the private sector use of consumer data proposes to make privacy a “fundamental right,” although how well it will protect Canadians remains to be determined.

Tech companies who compete with Big Tech often court consumers by promising protections from corporate surveillance and built in cybersecurity measures that keep people safe from cybercriminals. If smaller providers struggle with compliance, or even leave the market, it will mean fewer alternatives for Canadians, and can make our tech sector less competitive globally, if it means compromising their products. Privacy isn’t a niche concern, it’s a market position that recognizes people don’t like the internet that advertising and surveillance capitalism has built, and how it leaves them vulnerable.

As the conversation on these laws moves forward, CAMP will stay focused on how these proposals will protect Canadians as citizens and consumers, how well they meaningfully rein in the Big Tech companies who dominate our digital lives, and how they affect the ability for people to develop innovative and competitive alternatives. The government’s interest in duties of care and transparency, and a recognition of the need for good regulators and research are a good sign, but they will need to show, not tell, Canadians they can be trusted to navigate these complexities.

If you have any monopoly tips or stories you’d like to share, drop us a line at hello@antimonopoly.ca

Follow CAMP on Twitter LinkedIn Instagram or Facebook​