January 18, 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:

• CAMP urges Canada’s telecom regulator not to further weaken home internet competition
• The accelerating rise of highly dynamic and highly opaque personalized pricing
• News publishers come together to launch another challenge of Google’s advertising monopoly

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Now let’s dive in.

CAMP to the CRTC: Don’t Back Down on Home Internet Competition

Internet access is all but essential to everyday life, but Canadians continue to pay some of the highest pricesin the world for it. One reason is that the infrastructure for internet access, thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cables, exchange points, towers, and more, are expensive to build and maintain. Another reason is that the vast majority of it is owned by the Big 3 - Bell, Rogers and TELUS - who capture nearly 90% of the ISP market. Bad experiences with the telcos are as Canadian as maple syrup, and unlike the recent burst of competition we’ve seen in wireless, wireline prices remain stubbornly high.

To counteract this, Canada’s telecom regulator, the CRTC, introduces competition into the market through its wholesale access system. The system requires the Big 3 to sell bandwidth in bulk to independent ISPs at regulated wholesale rates set by the CRTC. How aggressively independent ISPs can compete is a function of where the CRTC sets that wholesale rates, with lower rates allowing for lower prices. But over the holidays, the CRTC asked the industry and Canadians whether the wholesale rate should be increased. Unsurprisingly, CAMP had some thoughts to share.

In our submission to the CRTC, CAMP argued that not only should the wholesale rate not increase, but that it should be brought down to allow for more intense competition. Until 2019, the market share for independent ISPs was growing steadily. But that growth has been replaced by steady decline and the roll up of independent ISPs after the CRTC flip-flopped on wholesale rates and created uncertainty for the entrepreneurs who were offering Canadians some competitive relief. To reverse this troubling trend, CAMP calls on the CRTC to do everything it can to bring wholesale rates down and provide certainty to those looking to build new competitors. CAMP is glad to be one of the few organizations fighting for the interests of consumers in front of the CRTC, and our submission in this proceeding is the preview of what will surely be an active year on the consumer protection front.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• Janmohamed, Sale of Jasper SkyTram raises concerns about lack of competition in Alberta mountain parks (CBC News)
• Postelnyak & Galea, Cellphone plans could be getting more expensive after years of falling prices, data suggest ( Globe & Mail)

A Special Price, Just for You

The days of price tags may be over as we move towards a world of highly personalized, down to the individual, pricing. This week, in a piece for the Walrus, SHIELD Institute managing director and CAMP Advisory Board member Vass Bednar writes that this world is already here. Recent work by Consumer Reports and Groundwork in the U.S. found Instacart prices could vary by as much as 23% between customers. This week, Google announced its “Universal Commerce Protocol” which will use Google’s vast trove of personal data to help retailers set and change prices dynamically, offer deals and discounts to close sales, and upsell consumers automatically and at scale.

If you went into a store and the staff asked you for your income, five years of purchase history, and distance from home before giving you the price of a good you might be put off, but that’s where we’re headed when it comes to e-commerce. Companies will say they’re only using this to offer discounts, never to raise the price. But discounts and loyalty programs can also be weaponized. There’s nothing stopping companies from jacking up base prices so that “discounts” for things like using a specific payment method, setting up automatic renewal, or signing your data away become practically mandatory.

CAMP’s already taken a stance on algorithmic price setting: it should be transparent for all customers, should not be based on sensitive data, and should not centralize pricing decisions across competitors. Pushback against these opaque and discriminatory prices is beginning. In Canada, the Manitoba Government has the practice in its sights for 2026 and Canada’s Competition Bureau is looking into its potential harms to competition. When markets work well, consumers get a fair deal. A key ingredient of working markets is the transparency that allows purchasers to weigh products and services against one another and drive competition. As the use of highly dynamic and personalized pricing explodes, we need to open up these black boxes to make sure Canadians aren’t being taken for a ride.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Schweizer, Grocery Update #129: How Public Grocery Stores Could Work In Canada (The Checkout)
• Ling, Canadians won’t let the U.S. government boss them around. But U.S. mega-corporations? Sure, why not (Toronto Star)

The Long March Against Google’s Monopolies

While Google scored serious antitrust wins in 2025, parallel challenges continue to emerge. Now that the U.S. DOJ made the case for the harms of Google’s decades long anticompetitive practices in online advertising, some of the victims are seeking restitution. A host of large online publishers including Vox Media, the Atlantic, Penske Media Group, and Advance Media Group (Condé Nast) are lining up to sue Google for its outsized piece of the online advertising pie. Regulators outside the U.S. remain active as well. The E.U. has ruled that Google abused its dominance in online advertising and a remedy is forthcoming, and the Competition Bureau is set to start its trial against Google next year.

Google’s online advertising empire was built with what is a now textbook Big Tech strategy: claim its systems are neutral marketplaces, buy or shut out competitors, and become inescapable infrastructure for the market. Once dominance is achieved, the extraction begins; squeezing customers on costs and blocking calls for greater transparency. Now, with the launch of its Universal Commerce Protocol, Google is hoping to repeat this process with the very act of pricing, one of the most important functions in markets. The retail giants eager to partner with Google on this new frontier should heed the warnings of others left in the wake of Google’s dominance.

These lawsuits are justified, but the damages they seek to address are in the rearview mirror. We need restitution for past harms, but we also need to protect the future of competition in existing and emerging markets. Here, the impending remedy decision in U.S. DOJ’s online advertising case against Google gives us some hope. Proposed remedies break open Google’s online advertising stack so they can’t represent buyers and sellers while also owning the marketplace in which these parties come together. Policy makers have a tendency to look backwards, but we need to shift our attention to the next frontier that these companies are seeking to dominate.

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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