February 8, 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:

• New CAMP report released on the scam problem endemic to oligopoly online advertising
• Global anti-monopoly groups track Big Tech’s use of mergers to dominate in AI in 2025
• U.S. DOJ and states appeal weak remedy that left Google’s search dominance intact

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Now let’s dive in.

Welcome to the World of Scams

If you were online during last year’s election, you probably saw at least one ad featuring a slightly off-putting video of a political leader offering a fantastic new investment opportunity courtesy of the federal government. Those ads are the tip of the iceberg of the exploding problem of scams facilitated by the online advertising market. In 2024, over 36,000 Canadians reported losing money to online scams, to the tune of nearly $650 million. The effects of these scams are not limited to consumers, with legitimate advertisers suffering reputational harms from impersonation and financial losses when ads are placed on low quality websites or farmed for clicks by bots.

In our new report, CAMP lays out some of the ways scammers exploit the online advertising market, how digital giants profit from the sale of scam ads, and how Canada’s government can step up to protect Canadian consumers and businesses from an increasingly predatory online advertising system. Whether its crypto scams, bogus investment schemes, or the evocatively named pig butchering, online scams are a monopoly problem. Tackling the issue means changing the incentives for the digital giants that dominate the online advertising market, turning blind eyes and reactive measures into proactive enforcement in defense of Canadians.

The good news is that a global response is building. This week, U.S. senators introduced new anti-scam legislation, joining peers like Australia, the European Union, Singapore, and Taiwan in making an assertive defense in the interests of consumers and businesses. Each of these approaches focus on data protection, transparency, advertiser verification, and liability for companies who fail to do their due diligence to remove scams. Now it’s our turn. Canada needs to move on anti-scam legislation today, and CAMP has provided the blueprint.

📰 CAMP in the News 📰

• O’Hara and Berkow, Private assets, public risk (The Globe and Mail)
• Park, Online scams are a multi-billion dollar business, CAMP survey finds (The Wire Report)

Charting Big Tech’s Spending Spree

After a brief dip in 2023, mergers are back on the menu for Big Tech in 2025. This week, Digital Merger Watch, a global network of anti-monopoly of organization of which CAMP is a part of, released their 2025 Mergers and Acquisitions report. Mergers and acquisitions have long been an important part of big tech’s drive to consolidate its power globally and to gain footholds in new markets. That’s what makes Digital Merger Watch’s work of tracking and intervening in harmful mergers around the world so important. Unsurprisingly, the major trend in 2025 was AI, with 15 of 25 major Big Tech acquisitions occurring in the markets related to generative AI.

But as enforcement scrutiny of acquisitions has ratcheted up, tech giants have adapted their playbook to evade regulators. In addition to the acquisition of emerging competitors, tech giants also employ strategic investments in the markets for the inputs that these companies depend on. By increasingly owning a stake in the infrastructure that supports new startups, these companies create an ecosystem where potential challengers are technologically and financially dependent on their competitors. The report also details the rise of acquihires, where a company simply hires away the top talent of an emerging threat, hollowing out their intellectual resources while avoiding triggering regulatory review.

While in some cases the services of acquired firms are folded into the acquirer’s offerings, Digital Merger Watch found that in 20% of cases acquired companies discontinued services entirely. Unfortunately, the truism that if you can’t beat them, buy them is proving to apply to the current wave of technological development. The acquisitive reach of these companies spans the globe, and CAMP is glad to be part of an international effort to track and curb this power. As middle powers navigate the new geopolitical landscape of 2026, this kind of collaboration across borders will be key.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Godfrey, Vander Stichele and Chipolina, Too Big to Cool the Planet: How Financial Power Blocks Planet-friendly Action and How to Break It (Balanced Economy Project)
• Balsillie, If you are worried about the rising cost of living, fight for better privacy regulations (The Globe and Mail)
• Gurley, The Scourge of Online Sports Betting (The American Prospect)

Appeal with Zeal

Last spring, a U.S. judge decided something obvious: Google has a monopoly in internet search. Then, the same judge did something less obvious: let them off the hook for it. The remedies hand down in the DOJ’s case against Google’s search monopoly were widely considered not up to snuff, relying too heavily on the hope that Google’s dominance was about to be disrupted by AI competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI. But just months later, Google’s share of the generative AI market has exploded and OpenAI is on the back foot as it aims to raise another massive funding round to keep itself afloat.

At the time, CAMP was disappointed to see the DOJ frame this remedy decision as a win, but the mood at the department has changed. This week, the DOJ and several state attorneys general announced they are seeking to appeal the remedy decision. Likely on their list of demands is a structural remedy that would see the Chrome browser, an important source of customer data, spun off from the company. Structural remedies are important because they limit Google’s ability to leverage its dominance into emerging competitive markets.

Google’s monopolies in search and online advertising have allowed it to commit to $185 billion of spending in the coming year to cement its dominance in the market for generative AI, a figure few rivals can match. While the market is fiercely competitive today, we risk a repeat of the pattern of tech domination we saw in the first two decades of the 2000s, this time without the scrappy upstarts. Putting it mildly, the Trump DOJ has been a mixed bag on antitrust, but between the Google search and Meta case there may be remaining room for 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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