December 14, 2025

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:

• Research shows companies like Instacart are secretly personalizing grocery prices in the U.S.
• An update on the state of concentration in Canadian media and internet industries
• EU launches abuse of dominance investigation into Google’s use of publisher and user content to train AI

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Now let’s dive in.

If Instacart Can Personalize Grocery Prices, What’s Next?

Should you and your neighbour pay different prices for the same groceries? New research by Consumer Insights and Groundwork Collaborative shows that for popular food delivery middleman Instacart, the answer is an emphatic “yes.” The research found that among 20 shoppers buying the same items from the same store at the same time, prices could vary by up to 7% per cart, and over 75 cents on individual items, adding up to hundreds of dollars over a year. These experiments show how person-to-person, or “first-degree,” pricing discrimination are now possible, opening a whole can of dynamically priced worms.

Pricing is odd in that we accept different standards in different situations. Plane tickets can vary wildly depending on when you buy them, and students and seniors are routinely entitled to discounts. But should this logic extend to the invisible segmentation of each and every one of us? Perfect price discrimination means the company doing the pricing can extract the maximum amount any individual would be willing to pay for a good. How well do we think this will work out for us when we already know the monopolized state of our grocery and food markets? We accept that grocers have higher and lower end versions of their stores with different prices, but those prices are still available to anyone who walks in the door, not gated behind an invisible algorithm.

We are increasingly in a world where our pricing is being personalized without our knowledge and not to our benefit. Markets are living and evolving social arrangements that have a direct effect on individual well-being. We should be able to decide where and to what limit this kind of price discrimination occurs and what areas and characteristics are off limits. What’s happening today is that companies like Instacart are testing the boundaries for what we will accept, and without pushback the practice will continue to become more common. Beyond competition, we need to set the boundaries for what we consider fair in our economy. Transparent prices for food that anyone can access is table stakes.

Concentration Stays Sky High in Canada’s Media Markets

Our ability to understand the markets around us depends on our access to data about those markets. Often the most monopolized markets are also the most opaque, with data held within private companies or behind expensive paywalls. That’s why it’s so valuable that every year the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) provides a wealth of data about the state and evolution of important communications markets around the world. This week, the project released its Canada edition which includes a wealth of information about the state of concentration in an impressive range of markets.

The main takeaway of the report remains that the defining feature of these markets is their high levels of concentration. Just one example, the report shows that Amazon, Google and Microsoft account for 85% of the total revenue in the cloud computing sector. Telecom also remains king, representing about two-thirds of the revenue for the entire media industry, over twice as much as is made through media content. Concerns over telecom prices were one of the founding motivations for CAMP, and the data shows we still have our work cut out for us.

Finding industry statistics is never simple, especially in Canada. Private firms provide expert market analysis, but at high cost out of reach of individuals, academics, and civil society organizations. In Canadian media especially, access to public data has been a longstanding problem for researchers. The work of the GMICP represents public knowledge creation at its best, invaluable to our ability to understand our history, and our current moment. The most recent edition of the Canadian report offers a wealth of information for anyone looking for a deep dive on critical markets in Canada.

📚 What We’re Reading 📚

• Geist, The catch-22 of Canadian digital sovereignty (The Globe and Mail)
• Nowak and Stoller, Blame America: Is Canada using Trump as an excuse to avoid acting on oligopolies?(Do Not Pass Go)
• Dayen, Why is Warner Bros. for Sale at All? (The American Prospect)

Data for Me, but Not for Thee

The European Commission announced this week they will formally investigate Google for anticompetitive practices in it’s use of publisher content to generate AI summaries, and its use of YouTube videos to train its generative AI models. Google’s monopoly in search, online advertising, and video allow the company to train its AI models on this data without compensating the producers of said data and excluding competitors from being able to do the same. The Commission is investigating whether Google’s ability to impose these terms on different players in the market constitutes an abuse of its corporate dominance.

The move by the Commission is welcome given Google’s proven ability to leverage it’s existing dominance into the new frontier of AI. Judge Mehta, the judge in the U.S. Google Search case, based his light touch remedy on the idea that Google’s dominance in search was about to be disrupted by AI. But what was framed as regulatory humility is looking more like hubris as the potential challengers to Google’s throne appear on shaky ground. Google has leveraged their vertically integrated assets, the data, infrastructure, hardware, and expertise into a new version of Gemini that has OpenAI sweating.

In one sense this is a positive competition story, where a threat from a challenger spurred a dormant behemoth into action. But the benefits to competition will be lost if the monopolization we saw in markets like search and online advertising simply re-assert themselves in generative AI. In a rebuke to the outcome of the Google Search case, structural interventions to address the reforming concentrations of power in the markets for AI are more important than ever. Action by the Commission is good, but they need to keep their eyes on the prize: breaking open the bottlenecks that will allow Google and its parent company Alphabet to remain in a controlling position.

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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