January 25, 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 instalment we have:

• Federal government undermines “hawkish” stance on competition with cuts to Competition Bureau
• Amazon gets between independent businesses and their customers with sneaky screen scrapes
• FTC appeals Meta monopoly loss but suspicions over Trump admin motivations remain

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Now let’s dive in.

Bureau Cuts Clash with Competition Commitments

Last year, Minister of Industry Melanie Joly said her government would be “hawkish” on competition. This week, it’s looking like the emphasis in that statement is going to be on the “ish.” As reported this week by Peter Nowak at Do Not Pass Go, the Competition Bureau is cutting 24 positions over the next three years, about 5% of its current staff. While these cuts are in line with the sufficiently bureaucratic “workforce adjustment” across the federal public service, the move undermines the government’s own commitments on promoting competition in Canada.

If you’re looking at federal spending, you would need a microscope to find the Competition Bureau. At $70 million a year, the law enforcement agency makes up about 0.01% of annual spending. But like any investment, the real question is the rate of return on this investment. Competition investigations have the potential to shift multi-billion-dollar markets. Take the Bureau’s ongoing investigation into whether the policies of real estate associations are limiting competition in the market for realtors. A quick back of the envelope with Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) data suggests Canadians could be spending as much as $15 billion annually on commissions for realtors. This means even a 0.5% shift in favour of buyers and sellers would put the budget of the Bureau back in the pockets of Canadians.

But these wins do not come easy. Every day the Competition Bureau squares off against the legal teams and resources of some of the largest companies on the planet, with ongoing investigation and litigation against Rogers, Google, DoorDash, and Amazon. Effectively enforcing Canada’s competition law takes proper financial and human resources. Moving in the wrong direction on Bureau funding means Canadians can expect less relief as the agency narrows its scope in response. As affordability remains a top priority for Canadians, adequate Bureau funding is an extremely cost effective signal that the government is serious about its previous commitments. Reversing this shortsighted decision and instead boosting the resources of the Competition Bureau is an easy way for this government to make good on its hawkish talk.

Even If You’re Not on Amazon, You’re on Amazon

There’s always been one obstacle for Amazon to live up to its moniker as “the everything store”: literally everything cannot be found on Amazon. Despite its digital dominance, businesses of all sizes, whether they use tools like Shopify or stand up their own sites, continue to avoid the platform in their operations. But a new brief from the Institute of Local Self Reliance shows that Amazon has the cure for this independence: scraping the sites of independent businesses without their permission, displaying their wares on the platform, and using bots to anonymously purchase the products.

With the introduction of a special “Buy For Me” button, Amazon can display the offerings of independent retailers and send an AI agent to buy the product, breaking the link between customer and business. While the independent retailer may get a sale, they are cut out of the relationship and critical data that comes with every purchase, only selling to a faceless Amazon agent. That this is a bad deal for retailers is evident in Amazon’s conduct when the conduct flows in the other direction. The company swiftly sent a cease and desist letter to AI search company Perplexity when it discovered the company was scraping the e-commerce giant’s own listings.

As ILSR shows, the straightforward way to prevent this is to ban scraping and proxy purchasing without the express consent of retailers. One of the reasons entrepreneurs start businesses is because they want the freedom to forge their own path. Policies like these would put control back in the hands of the people who own and operate their own businesses amid the steady march of centralization in our economies. If a business decides to use Amazon that’s their choice, but even the largest companies on the planet need to respect the decision to remain independent.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Pedersen, Cowley, Glover, and Joseph-Raji, How grocery giants control who can sell food in your neighbourhood (CBC)
• Ciuriak, The Economics of the Data-driven Economy and the Demand for Antitrust (Balsillie Papers)
• Ma, Zhang, and Zimmerman, Business Concentration Around the World 1900 – 2020 (NBER)

Bounded Optimism for the FTC’s Appeal of Meta Lawsuit

Last year, a U.S. judge ruled that Meta did not hold a monopoly in “personal social networking services,” ruling in favour of Meta in a lawsuit aiming to reverse the company’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp. Despite its control over world-leading social media platforms, Judge Boasberg found that Meta had plenty of competitors. The only problem? That definition of social media included properties as disparate as TikTok and YouTube. This week, news came that the FTC would be contesting the lines the judge drew around the relevant market and appealing the decision.

Market definition is a frequent sticking point in antitrust cases, leaving plenty of room for disagreement. When it comes to social media, a key question is what brings a user to the app and keeps them coming back. Mark Zuckerberg has long described Facebook as a “social utility” that underwrites everything from sharing photos to life milestones to events. The reason you use Facebook might be similar to the reasons you use Instagram or WhatsApp, but the further away we move from these original purposes the more tenuous the market definition becomes. Vertical videos do not a market make, and we’re sufficiently skeptical that consumers are coming to Facebook and YouTube for the same experience.

But as our friends at American Economic Liberties Projects point out, there’s reason to be skeptical of the motivations of the Trump 2.0 FTC. The decision deserves to be overturned, but is the current FTC Chair trying to protect competition or extract more concessions from an already pliant Zuckerberg? A year into this administration’s approach to antitrust has generated plenty of room to suspect this appeal will be another case of quid pro quo competition policy and result in a sweetheart settlement. We’re happy to be proven wrong, but until then we’ll be bounding our optimism.

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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