August 30, 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:

• How more competition at home can strengthen Canada’s hand in our trade war with the U.S.
• Microsoft extends its bundling strategy to tangle up AI and cloud markets
• Meta’s $18 billion settlement asks who should be protected from platform practices

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Now let’s dive in.

Tackling Monopoly Can Shore Up Canada’s Trade War Defences

It’s official: Canada’s latest answer to Washington’s trade war lands on September 8^th. Tariffs on more than 700 U.S. products, covering $27.6 billion in imports, alongside billions in new support for affected businesses and workers. The counter tariffs are designed to match the U.S. product-by-product, touching sectors including steel, dairy, and… tracksuits. To cushion to blow for import-dependent businesses, Ottawa is offering loans, diversification funding and expanded worker supports as these companies adjust to another round of economic turbulence from south of the border.

Tariffs deliberately reshape markets by making imports more expensive, giving domestic producers an advantage or creating leverage in negotiations. But that advantage can be turned against Canadians, especially in concentrated sectors. Companies in tariff-affected sectors with limited rivalry can pass higher input costs to consumers or raise prices to those of tariffed equivalents. After decades of neglect, Canada heads into this new phase of the trade fight with many of our markets highly concentrated. In a piece out this week, CAMP executive director Keldon Bester lays out how tackling monopolies at home is key to ensuring Canadians can bear the burden of a potentially protracted trade fight.

To give the country more ammo to pushback against American economic aggression, Ottawa should accelerate and expand the ambitions of its proposed Whole of Government Competition Plan. Beyond cutting red tape, the plan could be the basis for cracking open concentrated sectors like transportation, finance, and digital markets. Paired with expanding trade abroad and at home, an aggressive stance on oligopoly would ensure the cost of tariff barriers are spread across supply chains, not just borne by consumers. Canada needs as much latitude as we can get when it comes to tangling with the U.S. on trade. Breaking open monopolies at home will give us just that.

Microsoft Can’t Quit the Bundle

When it comes to office software, Microsoft is still the king. The company’s Microsoft 365 environment gives it unparalleled access to millions of office workers, whether they like it or not. That’s why the decision to embed Copilot, the company’s AI assistant, into that ecosystem could have major implications for the consumer AI market. Microsoft has run this playbook before. In a piece for the Washington Examiner this week, David Linthicum lays out how the bundling of Copilot could be a replay of the strategy that allowed Microsoft to make Internet Explorer the dominant web browser, and managed to get the company in antitrust hot water in the 90s.

Microsoft’s distribution advantage is compounded by its outsized role in the infrastructure powering AI development. Microsoft can bundle applications, cloud services and AI tools into a single environment, while proprietary systems, opaque contracts and high switching costs make leaving progressively harder. CAMP covered these dynamics in our Parting Clouds report out earlier this year. Dominance in one line of a hyperscaler’s business models creates opportunities to extend that dominance to others through bundling, tying, and customer lock-in.

Competition enforcers aren’t taking these developments lying down. Earlier this year, the U.K. CMA kicked off an investigation into Microsoft’s cloud computing business and introduced interoperability and egress fee requirements on the cloud businesses of both Microsoft and Amazon. This summer, the European Commission reached a preliminary decision that the same companies’ cloud businesses should qualify them as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. In a new brief this week, CAMP lays out what the preliminary designation could mean for competition in cloud computing and what Canada should be taking away from it. The fashion of the 2000s might be having a comeback, but when it comes to antitrust the hottest decade these days may end up being the 90s.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Nowak, Canada's Non-Compete Problem Is Getting Worse (The Peak)
• Nguyen, Minding the Gaps in Surveillance Pricing Reform (American Economic Liberties Project)
• Dalrymple, What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World (New York Times)

$18 Billion Later, Will Meta Get the Message? (No)

Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade to settle lawsuits from nearly every U.S. state alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed children. Under the settlement, beyond the dollar figure, teenage users will face two-hour daily limits, overnight restrictions, fewer school-hour notifications and stronger barriers around age-restricted content. While these restrictions are a positive step, the agreement leaves Meta’s actual business model, personalized recommendations and targeted advertising, intact.

Limits on the design of digital platforms matter well beyond teenagers. While children are a uniquely vulnerable group, platforms use recommender systems, profiling, notifications and other engagement tools across their entire user base. The same tools that platforms employ to manipulate the behaviour and emotions of users have created an ecosystem ripe for fraud. Writing in the Globe this week, UOttawa professor Michael Geist highlighted the scale of fraud targeting seniors: Canadians over 60 lose more per reported fraud incident than any other age group, with social media a key vector for exploitation. When manipulation is this valuable, we don’t get a pass once we turn 18.

Canada has an opportunity to do something about the full range of harms facing citizens online with the introduction of the Safe Social Media Act. Safety-by-design obligations, clearer rules around deception and inauthentic behaviour, systemic risk assessments, and user control over recommendation systems can tackle not just the psychological but also the economic costs of platform abuse. A durable framework would regulate the systems that amplify risk and assign responsibility to the companies best positioned to reduce it. While the dollar figure pales in comparison to the company’s annual revenue, the Meta settlement reminds us of a fundamental lesson: platform design can be governed. It’s a lesson Canada should heed.

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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