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I’m retiring (or pausing) “regs to riches” right now. I feel guilty and super strange that my subscribership is growing as I offer literally nothing new, so here’s a quick update:

In June, I left McMaster University to build the Canadian SHIELD Institute - a new think tank focussed on securing homegrown innovation, economic leadership, and defence. We’re squarely focussed on economic sovereignty. Building and restoring this across all corners of Canada is what consumes me now. It feels right to pour my energy here as we muddle through this trade war.

So I’m often writing in a different newsletter, and that’s SHIELD’s. The publication is (somewhat cheekily) called The National Interest, and you can subscribe to it here. Some of the top posts have been about agentic payments, stablecoins, and TikTok.

And I’ve still been writing for The Globe and Mail, and sometimes the Walrus magazine. Those are two other outlets where I’ve been writing about the economy and how we can make it more effective, less exploitative.

I’ve learned so much through “regs” and made some wonderful new friends. Thank you for reading, for whispering in my digital ear, and correcting me (every now and then). What an honour to learn from others, and think aloud and in the open.

As I officially pause this thing, here’s an essay I wrote after I read the new National Security Strategy from the Trump administration - a modern form of gunboat diplomacy I think I wrote it in a way that this outlet helped me hone.

Our generation tumbles forward amongst the strangest and most surreal [online] imagery. We constantly scroll by stills and short videos of vignettes that snapshot the irrational upending of the rules-based order as we knew it: innocent fishermen clinging to wreckage only to be blown up 45 minutes later, children separated by their parents by ICE, the East Wing of the White House being indiscriminately bulldozed, an AI-generated video of poop falling on protestors posted by the President (!) and the Minister of “War” hosting exercise workshops and clumsy parades are just a few. I mean, I’ve blocked out the “Ho Ho Home” meme from Homeland Security.

We are spectators as US trade decisions mess with our economy. And as our relationship to the US continues to contort, most of us just try really hard to go about our everyday lives. And that’s the same question for our political leaders: are we going to keep just watching all of this, or will we be more active participants in resisting Trump’s imposition on our sovereignty?

The latest humiliation that Canada has endured in the wild, disruptive and endlessly disorienting trade war is having our Prime Minister seated near President Trump during the FIFA World Cup Draw while he danced to the Village People after receiving a fake peace prize.

It’s like living in an alternative universe; a mad lib of the absurd. And that’s because the rules of our universe are being unilaterally rewritten by the United States of America. We first caught whiffs of the forthcoming trade war through an ALL CAPS post on Truth Social. Then, on “Liberation Day,” tariff levels were revealed on whiteboards that felt like ChatGPT suggested a tax for penguins, and just generally abandoning the collection and publication of key national statistics like jobs, GDP and inflation.

This is an unserious yet strangely savage administration, and yet Canada is in a strange diplomatic situation where we have to engage them with a straight face.

The latest confirmation of just how profoundly the US has switched gears when it comes to trade and foreign policy was published in the National Security Strategy. Defence expert Wesley Wark notes that it casts Canada as expendable.

Canada is barely mentioned in the document; framing our country as inconsequential. The strategy represents an overt and sweeping rejection of post-war “globalism” and free trade. It’s just as surreal as Trump’s fake video that showed Barack Obama being arrested.

Trump has vowed to reassert and enforce the Monroe doctrine, explicitly denying non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or “own or control strategically vital assets” to ensure US pre-eminence in the region. Further, the strategy treats industrial base rebuilding, energy dominance, critical minerals and control of key technology like AI, biotech, and quantum as core security goals, not just economic policy. The U.S. stresses that its treaty allies and partners add ~$35 trillion in economic power and must work with Washington to counter predatory practices. But it also insists allies must spend more on defence and adjust their trade policies to help rebalance China’s economy. Canada is named once in this context. It explicitly embraces “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and insists that allies should no longer expect to earn income from the U.S. through “structural imbalances.” Ann Fitz-Gerald, a professor of international security, called it “a return to cold geopolitical transactionism.”

So far, Prime Minister Carney has done his best to play it cool with the Trump administration this year. You could even say he has been nice: making baseball quips from the Oval Office and joking when Trump called Carney the ‘President of Canada.’ Ha.

If anything, it’s been ironic to note that Canada’s ‘elbows’ are up when it comes to the influence of market forces here at home. Where we were once comfy with how corporate consolidation has come to characterize the country; telling ourselves that we needed to pick and nurture national champions in order to compete globally - we are now starting to take on more of an anti-monopoly agenda. Don’t forget - one of Prime Minister Trudeau’s last little policy acts was an Order in Council to cap NSF fees at banks. That was a provocative gesture that asserted the role of the state in moderating markets and making them more free and fair.

It’s so cool to call for more competition that the Bank of Canada is now doing it, too; albeit while staying focussed on federally-regulated industries instead of acknowledging the opportunity for the entire economy. And the One Canadian Economy stuff on internal trade is good groundwork to do more, faster, across the federation. It’s basically a warm-up drill, and now, we need to buckle up for battle.

While it has been encouraging to realize that we are visibly frustrated with corporate concentration here at home, we’re also perversely silent on Big Tech issues now in Canada; I’ve written that Budget 2025 sort of forgets about the Internet. It may be that anything Big Tech related is simply too sensitive in the trade war as the ‘Magnificent 7’ are all US companies. But that’s ironic and meme-worthy, too, because these are companies that (much like the Trump administration) EXPLICITLY want to DOMINATE us. Economist Paul Krugman called it a digital narco-state. So if not now, then when, exactly?

If monopolies were happening sort of by accident before in Canada, we should now expect subjugation by Big Tech and retaliation from the US. So is our primary adversary in the trade war President Trump, or Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla? It’s probably both.

We need to stand up for the economy (and economies) that we want, now. This could also mean building new alternatives here at home: like reimagining the adtech stack so our businesses aren’t renting access to their own customers, designing a unified digital ledger to future-proof how Canadians move money, and finally treating dual-use tech investments as strategic IP assets rather than accidental giveaways.

Budget 2025 doesn’t really acknowledge that we’re under attack by our neighbours. It’s an investment agenda that seeks to capitalize on strategic investments in Canada’s assets like natural resources, energy, critical minerals and clean-technology assets. And when it comes to defending ourselves, there are historic investments in defence and dual-use technologies. But we also need decisive public policy in order to defend ourselves from the new aggregation and predation of the US. A good offence is a good defence.

We can’t sit in the stands while Trump does the YMCA. Monopolization and dominance is now explicitly the US’ trade policy right now. That doesn’t mean Canada needs to dance to that tune. In fact, I can hear the Village People right now, asking Canada: “...I said young man, what do you want to be?”

Canada’s been anything but absent from the tech-sovereignty fight. In just three years, Ottawa has pushed through the Online Streaming Act (C-11), the Online News Act (C-18), modernized the Competition Act, a draft Online Harms Act, and a problematic privacy bill that died on the Order Paper. Each were attempts to curb Big Tech’s reach where traditional competition law never really caught up - sometimes they felt like remedies for cases the Tribunal never heard. Anyways, each of these legislative proposals were deeply contested and heavily lobbied. And those laws were true battles: messy, imperfect, but undeniably fought. Our problem isn’t that Canada won’t swing in these fights or that we’re too quick to politely concede, it’s that every punch is landing on rails that we simply do not own. 

The deflating retreat of the Digital Services Tax (DST) reveals a deeper weakness: even when Parliament raises a shield, runaway platforms sprint around it. With C-18, Google negotiated a capped payout and Meta blocked news entirely. With C-11, streamers will likely pass their CanCon levy straight to consumers, if the digital streaming tax moves forward at all, and the DST has already disappeared. It can make you wonder whether pursuing these policies is even worth it in the first place. 

This same structural vulnerability looms over the future of the Online Harms Act and a much-needed refresh on privacy reform. Without the power to compel compliance through things like hosting mandates, data-localisation requirements, or market-structuring tools, the state is left essentially scolding multinationals to please play nice. It hasn’t worked well. 

This keeps happening to us for two reasons. The first is jurisdictional leverage. Most of our data, cloud workloads, payment rails and ad exchanges all sit on infrastructure owned abroad. When the “factory” is elsewhere, public policy interventions become an act of persuasion rather than power. The second is reactive design. Each of those laws chases a symptom (i.e. news funding, hateful content, kids’ privacy) rather than attacking the platform business model that monetizes reach without liability head on. To continue the terrible fighting metaphor that we are all exhausted of, we may be aiming our punches at the wrong places. 

We can use policy to change the terrain, and there are good examples to draw inspiration from. Take Europe’s Digital Markets Act, France’s ad-tech decree (which forces every intermediary in the ad stack to disclose impression-level prices and fees so publishers can see exactly what each middleman skims) and Germany’s Linux-for-government migration, which each show strategic ways to start to restore jurisdiction: mandate interoperability, insist on domestic hosting for sensitive data, and use procurement offsets to seed a home grown stack. Modest but meaningful shifts. 

As it turns out, Canada’s toolkit is far broader and more imaginative than yet another levy or streaming surcharge, but we don’t seem to be using it to its full advantage. Consider that Indigenous governments are already insisting that their data stay on their soil. Quebec is quietly proving that a province can run its own digital ID without leaning on Apple or Google. If we can prototype a full EV drivetrain in Windsor, maybe we can do the same for a sovereign GPU cloud. And while Canada’s $2-billion AI Compute Strategy puts real money on the table, its success will hinge on governance; we should ring-fence at least half the fund for open-weights models hosted on Canadian soil and audited in public.

Canada has blown a bunch of political capital proving that Big Tech won’t negotiate in good faith, if the companies come to the table at all. So let’s redirect that energy. There are a lot of great proposals bubbling up right now around bolstering Canada’s digital sovereignty and diversifying away from Big Tech, including this open letter on resetting Canada’s Digital Policy. Builders are exploring how to build a more sovereign and secure stack, and people are changing their everyday digital practices in the same way they reallocated their spending. Part of the 5% defence spending surge should be used to underwrite a Canadian cloud and open-source workplace suites, with federal agencies as an anchor tenant. We could require platforms to keep Canadian user data in Canadian-owned data centres, threatening that without data residency, there will be no market access. 

Other legislative attempts to level the playing field with Big Tech firms weren’t total failures of imagination. They were more like early-round jabs as we sized up our opponents. The lesson for Canada isn’t to stop swinging, but rather, to shift our stance. Because we do not own these digital infrastructures, the laws we’ve recently passed and hope to in the future rely on diplomatic courtesy and are constantly vulnerable during trade renegotiations. Big Tech firms have shown, time after time, that they prefer to pursue expensive and lengthy fights. Ottawa has spent five years proving to us that the negotiating table is pretty tiled. Maybe it’s time we built a new table. 🪑

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The past week has offered a crash course in why media sovereignty still matters. When a single conglomerate can pay a sitting U.S. president US$16 million to make a nuisance lawsuit vanish, it’s hard to pretend corporate publishers and broadcasters are neutral conduits of information. Media scholar Victor Pickard captured the outrage succinctly in the tweet below.

Canada isn’t immune to that power imbalance. As we argue about a Digital Streaming Tax and other cultural-funding tools, the deeper question is who gets to set the rules of our media marketplace in the first place. University of Alberta professor Brian Fauteux reminds us that global platforms have long tried to write the script for Canadian cultural policy — satellite radio was only Act One. His thread follows.

Read together, Pickard’s alarm bell and Fauteux’s historical caution show two sides of the same sovereignty coin: concentrated ownership south of the border can warp democratic accountability, while hands-off regulation at home invites foreign giants to dictate the terms of our own cultural life. That’s the gap Ottawa’s next round of digital-policy reforms must close.

In my most recent column, I argue that Canada’s product-liability regime has never caught up to the software that now shapes our economy, politics and mental health. Platforms still hide behind the fiction that they are “neutral intermediaries,” even as they design recommender systems that decide what we see, buy and believe. Europe is already moving to treat code like any other consumer product: liable for defects and harms. Canada should do the same.

In this guest post, my friend Barry Appleton unpacks how we got here, why resurrecting the old SAGIT model matters, and what it would take for Canada to secure a fair share of Big Tech’s revenue, instead of settling for the crumbs that slip through today’s tax rules. Because sovereignty isn’t a slogan; it’s a set of capabilities we choose to build (or dismantle).

*I got to meet Barry at a dinner earlier this year, and I’ve been learning a ton about trade from him. He’s a trade, investment, and digital economy expert and has his own blog, “Clause and Effect.” We love a pun. ❤️

Barry Appleton

In a stunning reversal that reveals the depth of Canada's economic dependence, Prime Minister Carney's government rescinded the Digital Services Tax just hours before implementation on June 30. Trump's 72-hour ultimatum worked exactly as intended—Canada blinked first, again.

This was no diplomatic victory; it was economic vandalism masquerading as statecraft. The DST collapsed under a simple threat. Canada chose submission over sovereignty.

Trump’s administration understands trade not as mutual prosperity but as domination—extracting submission before the negotiation even begins. These issues were never about economic principle; they were about extracting tributes to enhance political theatre. The DST, a symbolic effort to reclaim sovereignty in the digital age, collapsed under the weight of Canada's profound structural dependence on the United States.

The math is devastating: Trump threatened to disrupt $762 billion in annual bilateral trade over a $2 billion tax. Canada's structural dependence made resistance impossible. Trump's strategy is simple: threaten massive retaliation for minor irritants, forcing Canada to choose between economic damage and policy independence.

This is Trump’s trade world: where power, unpredictability, and provocation reign supreme, displacing established rules and respect. Canada’s hurried retreat underscores a deep truth that Canadians have long ignored: the "special relationship" was never special—it was transactional, and Canada has been dangerously naive.

Game Theory: Understanding Trump’s Strategy

Trump's strategy is elegantly simple: threaten massive retaliation for minor irritants, forcing Canada to choose between economic damage and policy independence. Canada consistently chooses submission, encouraging future threats. Each ultimatum transforms what should be negotiations into a series of costly concessions.

This reveals Canada's strategic predicament: we are playing a game where Trump controls the board. When your opponent can eliminate your options through structural dependence, tactics become irrelevant. Canada faces what strategists call a 'no-win scenario'—every move available to us benefits our opponent.

The DST debacle reveals a strategic vacuum at the heart of Canada's trade policy. It is not surprising Canada yielded—what is surprising is that Canada ever believed it held leverage in the first place.

Beyond Capitulation: Strategic Sovereignty

This capitulation reveals a troubling pattern. The 'special relationship' was never special—it was transactional. Trump's world operates on power and provocation, not rules. Canada's retreat signals that Canadian sovereignty has a price tag—and it's surprisingly low.

Canada's capitulation becomes even more humiliating when viewed comparatively. The UK maintains its Digital Services Tax without facing ultimatums from Washington. France, Italy, and other allies implement similar measures without surrendering sovereignty. What makes Canada different? Not economic logic, but psychological dependence. We've trained ourselves to capitulate before pressure is even applied.

Canada faces an existential choice: accept perpetual subjugation or build strategic alternatives.

Canada's misguided reliance on an outdated neo-liberal trade orthodoxy—that prosperity naturally follows a rules-based global order—must be abandoned. Neo-liberalism is dead, killed not by Canada's ideological foes, but by its closest ally. Trying to resuscitate it from the dead is as much a policy folly as it is dangerous for Canada's economic and competitive future.

This shift from a rules-based order to power-based bargaining risks not only Canadian sovereignty but global economic stability. But this is now the game. Rules based agreements no longer are guaranteed. This requires Canada to pay more attention to robustness and alternatives now more than ever.

Resilience and Retaliation: Rethinking Canada’s Options

Canada must pivot from passive acceptance to proactive strategy. Policies that think about the changing economy and the digital AI world. In this game of thrones world, Canada has to keep earning its seat at the table by showing its necessity and strategic importance. To confront economic coercion effectively, Canada needs a recalibration.

• Strategic ambiguity: Keep Trump uncertain about Canadian responses, weaponizing unpredictability to increase Canada's strategic leverage. Strategic ambiguity from Canada means keeping Trump guessing about Canadian responses. This could include:

  • Conditional cooperation: 'We'll discuss market modifications only after tariff threats end'.

  • Asymmetric retaliation: Target politically sensitive US exports (think Kentucky bourbon, Florida oranges).

  • Timeline uncertainty: Refuse to commit to Trump's arbitrary deadlines.

• Conditional cooperation: Negotiations must not proceed under duress; Canada should set clear boundaries: discussions on Canadian sovereign policy – be it digital taxes or supply management - only occur when tariff threats cease.

• Rebuilding domestic capacity: Canada must also enhance its domestic capacities. Strategic sectors, such as critical minerals, clean energy, digital governance, and advanced intellectual property, should be strengthened domestically. A resilient economy is less vulnerable to foreign demands and more capable of withstanding the stress tests of trade disputes.

To respond effectively, Canada must reinforce both economic and strategic resilience. This requires re-establishing the robust Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade (SAGIT) or similar stakeholder consultation mechanisms that were crucial during NAFTA renegotiations.

The dismantling of Canada's Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade (SAGIT) twenty years ago left Canada flying blind in complex negotiations. These were not just talk shops, they were standing committees of industry, labour, and civil society experts who provided real-time intelligence and swift response capabilities during NAFTA talks, allowing negotiators to understand immediately how proposals would affect different sectors.

While the U.S. built sophisticated trade infrastructure and strategic capacity, Canada systematically dismantled ours. Canada approaches critical negotiations with ad hoc consultation. This institutional asymmetry must end. The elimination of SAGIT was not just institutional downsizing—it was strategic disarmament. We entered a knife fight with a butter knife. 🧈

Trump’s trade aggression underscores not just an economic imperative but a digital sovereignty imperative—transforming digital policy from reactionary taxation measures to proactive market restructuring and robust regulatory frameworks. Canada's sovereignty in the digital age depends critically on systemic thinking and proactive capacity building rather than incremental reactions to external pressure.

Canada's approach to digital policy exemplifies reactive thinking—taxing platforms after they have captured our markets rather than structuring those markets to serve Canadian interests. Real digital sovereignty requires upstream intervention: reshaping how digital markets operate, not just skimming revenue from monopolistic behavior.

Upcoming blog posts will start to outline the seismic shifts and how Canada needs to reconfigure its thinking to keep pace.

From Capitulation to Renaissance

The DST debacle reveals Canada's deeper strategic failure: we think reactively, not systemically. Instead of building capacity to shape digital markets, we built mechanisms to tax monopolistic behaviour. Instead of creating alternatives to dependence, we created more sophisticated forms of submission. True sovereignty requires rewriting the rules, not just negotiating better terms within someone else's game.

Canada Day 2025 must mark awakening, not just celebration. Canadians must demand their government stop negotiating from its knees. Sovereignty is strategic, not symbolic. The government must restore our SAGITs, rebuild strategic capacity, and reject the psychology of preemptive surrender.

The alternative to building resilience now is accepting permanent vulnerability to whoever occupies the White House. That is not sovereignty, it is dependency with a maple leaf. Capitulation has led nowhere. It is time to change the game. 🇨🇦

What do you think? How should Canada respond to this pattern of preemptive surrender? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you found this analysis valuable, please share it with others who care about Canadian sovereignty and strategic independence.

Subscribe to Barry’s blog Clause & Effect for more analysis on trade policy, digital sovereignty, and Canada's strategic challenges.

Barry Appleton

I got to chat through what it means to “Buy Canadian” last week on CBC’s Front Burner w/ Jayme Poisson and CBC’s ‘Just Asking’ w/ Saroja Coelho. And Liz Pelly’s excellent new book Mood Machine: the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist has been kicking around my mind, so I linked the two up in this essay.

As Canadians brace for Trump’s tariffs, many are turning to homegrown products. This moment isn't just about economic resilience—it’s an opportunity to embrace Canadian culture more fully and rethink digital marketplaces that have long undercut the earnings of the artists we love.

Spotify has revolutionized how we access music, and, by extension, who gets elevated, what we hear, and how much artists earn (or don’t). As of December 2024, Spotify boasts over 675 million monthly users, including 263 million paying subscribers. Streaming now accounts for most of the money generated by the music industry, and Spotify has the biggest share of that market.

In the excellent “Chokepoint Capitalism,” Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin argue that Spotify, alongside major record labels, has “rigged” the industry by acting as a gatekeeper. Streaming’s business model keeps artists financially dependent and, ultimately, underpaid. Spotify pays about 67% of music revenue back to rights holders, but the money first goes to record labels, publishers, and other intermediaries, who take their cut before artists see anything. Major label contracts shrink payouts further. The per-stream payout? An estimated $0.00348 - so small it’s functionally invisible.

But that per-stream payout number is misleading. Spotify’s ‘streamshare’ model distributes payments based on an artist’s share of total listening, not individual plays. This means subscription fees don’t directly support the artists that listeners choose, leading some critics to argue for a more user-centric payment model where payouts would be based on what people actually listen to. Meanwhile, Spotify keeps squeezing musicians: last April, it eliminated payments for songs with fewer than 1,000 annual streams, and that same month, the firm added audiobooks into premium subscriptions. This expanded Spotify’s offerings without raising prices or increasing artist payouts.

Spotify’s long-term play might not just be controlling distribution—it may be reducing reliance on human artists altogether. In her new book Mood Machine, music journalist Liz Pelly has pointed out how Spotify actively promotes AI-generated music and algorithmically optimized background noise, which are cheaper to host and don’t require royalty negotiations. At the same time, many musicians, like session players, producers, and co-writers, often don’t hold the rights to their own work, and see little to no streaming revenue. If Spotify can replace real artists with AI soundscapes, it stands to recoup even more money while further devaluing human creativity.

Consumers exacerbate this trend because we’ve ceded control of our listening experiences to tech platforms. We now consume more music than ever, but often as background noise: moody playlists for working, studying, and showering. We’re half-listening while paying too little attention to how we’ve all allowed a digital platform to reshape the music economy to benefit itself, while artists are left scrambling for scraps.

The conversation is shifting. In the US, proposals like the Living Wage for Musicians Act and the Protect Working Musicians Act are emerging, and new forms of resistance are sparking fresh debates about creator compensation. But more needs to be done. Just as “buying local” is gaining traction in food and retail, maybe it’s time to think about listening locally, too. Direct consumption through physical media or Bandcamp-style platforms better values the culture we care about.

More needs to happen in Canada. Regulators championed Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, to boost the discoverability of ‘Canadian’ content. But without addressing the exploitative remuneration models that streamers impose on creators, that policy effort is incomplete. Ensuring people can find Canadian content is one thing; making sure the artists behind it can earn a living is another.

One proposal currently being litigated is a 5% levy on music streamers’ Canadian revenues, which would fund Canadian artists and level the playing field—similar to how radio broadcasters contribute. Industry groups like CIMA argue this policy is overdue, but streamers are resisting, claiming they already support artists through exposure and royalties. Yet exposure doesn’t pay rent, and as subscription prices rise while payouts shrink, the imbalance grows deeper.

Canada has long regulated radio and television to support homegrown artists, yet streaming has escaped meaningful oversight even though it’s now the dominant way people listen to music. While Canadian broadcasters contribute millions annually to support local artists, streamers have effectively operated in a legal grey zone, profiting from Canadian culture without reinvesting in it.

The question isn’t whether Spotify is convenient—it’s whether convenience should come at the cost of a living wage for musicians. Without intervention, we risk a future where music is controlled entirely by corporations, not creators. It’s time to make streaming pay.

Earlier this month, Parliamentarians had Michael Rousseau, the CEO of Air Canada, Zoom into a Parliamentary Committee meeting. They were livid. At the core of their well-justified annoyance was Air Canada’s recent announcement that they will no longer allow basic-fare passengers to carry on luggage; instead, they will have to pay $35 to check one bag as of January.

If this new charge feels like an artificial cash-grab, that’s because it is. There’s no extra staff time associated with carry on bags. The change allows Air Canada to (potentially) advertise a lower base fare in its efforts to compete with the handful of other airlines in Canada, and is part of the great ‘unbundling’ of pricing. While ‘drip pricing’ - the act of adding on a string fees as you go through a purchasing process, making it impossible for the purchaser to obtain the initial price that was advertised - became illegal in Canada two years ago, airlines skirt this by claiming that each additional fee is a distinct, value-added service. One of my favourite memes calls this bluff, joking that Spirit Airlines charges a “cloud tax” and for “in-flight oxygen.” Where’s the lie?

The FTC defines these “junk” fees as unfair or deceptive fees added onto the price of a good or service that anyone would reasonably expect to be included in the price. Put more plainly: they are fees that add no value. And they often have fancy-ish names that lend them unwarranted credibility, think: ‘service’ fee, ‘convenience fee’ or ‘administrative fee,’ just some of the hallmarks of this deceptive cash grab. At their core, an unjustified junk fee is a form of “exploitative innovation,” whereby a firm is encouraged to develop new junk fees instead of actually improving their product. It’s lazy. Companies have been getting away with sprinkling these onto our bills for too long.

This never-ending-getting-dinged has been deemed ‘The Age of Recoupment’ by American anti-monopolists David Dayen and Lindsay Owens - a time where companies use a range of tactics to squeeze every last dollar they can. Consider that someone looked at how Air Canada was making money and with no remorse decided that carry-on luggage shouldn’t be a freebie. The most aggravating element is that we’re just not doing enough to call that bluff. On the other hand, modest fees to check a bag or choose your seat on a flight are reasonable and can be avoided by travellers.

But it’s not like we aren’t trying (or claiming to). The current federal government has made eliminating junk fees a policy priority - sort of. The most recent Fall Economic Statement rebranded them slightly as ‘hidden’ fees. First flagged in March 2023’s Budget, the commitment was reaffirmed in the 2023 Fall Economic Statement - even firing shots at the banks by tasking then-Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland with reviewing bank fees to see if they are excessive in 2021. At that same time last year, a pledge was made to work with regulatory agencies in the provinces and territories to reduce junk fees. And there’s a role for the provinces, here: back in 2016, Ontario made it illegal for desperate parents to be exploited by a fee to be added to a childcare waitlist in Ontario. Simple, elegant, and decisive: don’t do that.

But is the commitment itself junk? Progress on this pocketbook issue has been slow, though recent credit card and interchange fee reductions are estimated to save eligible small businesses about $1 billion over the next five years.

Junk fees don’t only plague consumers. Businesses often pay junk-ish fees; just look at Amazon’s toll road, or what it takes to get your item on the shelf at a grocery store. They are the result of market power, and firms are often disincentivized to speak out about them. They also exist in the public sector through governments and universities that may charge opportunistic fees that aren’t commensurate with what they purport to support.

Cansumer, a product recommendation service, collected some Canadian junk fee examples, crowd-sourcing examples like banks charging inactivity fees and various dings with mortgage closing costs. In British Columbia, Uber recently introduced a ‘regulatory compliance cost’ fee after the government mandated a minimum wage for workers - passing the cost onto us. Brazen junk.

The US has taken a much more aggressive, federalist approach to naming and shaming junk fees, and the FTC just finalized their Junk Fees Rule, which requires that businesses clearly and conspicuously disclose the true total price inclusive of all mandatory fees whenever they offer, display, or advertise any price of live-event tickets or short-term lodging.

In Canada, we have been more reliant on vigilante consumers. One problem may be basic (and boring) division of power issues - junk fees are broader than ‘deceptive marketing’ provisions under the Competition Act. Plus, on their own, these fees seem miniscule and trite, which makes it difficult for their elimination to be justified against other pressing policy problems. But minimizing them is a mistake - what were once thought of as quirky annoyances actually impact our standard of living. Junk fees are an anti-monopoly issue, but they’re also a credibility one.

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The Goose made this epic video about Canada’s Monopoly Problem. Totally worth listening to the very end - he’s subject to an algorithmic overlord, too! I was blown away by the care and skill that he (Aaron Hagey-MacKay) put into this arefact. I also love his energy and analogies - he is inspiring me to be more energetic in interviews!

Paramount recently released the first 7 minutes of SMILE 2 online, but you can only watch it if you smile into your webcam for the ENTIRE time. On Twitter, Puneet Singh observed that it’s “an insane new level of data collecting.” It's a cute and au courant gimmick - 420 seconds of an exaggerated expression in exchange for a sneak peek at a gruesome horror film.

It seems unlikely that this obvious marketing tactic was actually designed to steal the likeness of fans, but only time (and the terms and conditions) can tell how innately trusting fans will be treated by Paramount and its service providers. And while there is speculation on Reddit that the images may be used further for the film’s marketing, the reality is that we are used to passively trading information about ourselves - like our geography, purchase history, and demographics - with companies. 

This particular gimmick, however, deserves closer consideration as it reminds us that our expressions are a rich source of data. For starters, we are increasingly able to control technology with our facial expressions - mobile games like Rainbrow and Nose Zone use facial movements to control game play. These activities are benign, but they add to a corpus of research and program development that allows computers to get progressively better at anticipating and interpreting our expressions. Announced this past spring, Apple’s Eye Tracking feature allows people to control their iPad or iPhone with their eyes. Remember when Zoom announced they were developing a system to scan users’ faces and listen to their speech in order to determine their emotions? Cameras allow companies to capture imperceptible impressions from us about our mood and how we respond to ads and design decisions without us even realising.

Some of this facial monitoring can be legitimately helpful. For instance, the technology is used in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to monitor driver attention, detect drowsiness, and improve safety. It can also be used to diagnose neurological and psychiatric conditions, and making the world more accessible to more people is crucial. Eye-tracking tech is sometimes deployed during the remote proctoring of tests in an effort to detect and deter cheating, and in gaming, augmented reality headsets rely on eye tracking to allow us to engage in the metaverse. It’s here, it’s. happening.

But not all firms aren’t analysing how we feel and where we gaze just to be polite or help us have fun. They want to proxy our emotions and reactions in order to better understand physiological responses to advertising. Recall that when Google acquired Fitbit, the European Commission made the merger conditional on a ‘data wall' that would separate health and fitness data from advertising purposes. Without this kind of separation, the digital giant might be able to detect a change in pulse after viewing ads. But that measure hasn’t stopped firms from trying to understand our reactions to content and ads through other mechanisms.

Our passive expressions are being watched when we shop, and sometimes when we veg at home on the couch. 

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Our ‘smart’ televisions already watch us. A recent report from the Center for Digital Democracy detailed how our television sets have been transformed into a sophisticated monitoring, tracking, and targeting device; urging the FTC and FCC to investigate connected TV industry data harvesting. A system from Caltech and Disney Research uses a facial expression tracking neural network to learn and predict how an audience will react during testing. Facial biometrics are already becoming a part of just participating in an audience.

This application of surveillance systems allows advertisers to ‘optimise’ ad placements. Companies like Sticky and Realeyes use eye-tracking to measure emotional responses to advertisements. Similar companies like EyeSee and ShopperMX use eye tracking and emotion recognition to derive insights on shopper behaviour. To some, this may seem benign, but for others, it comes as a surprise.

It shouldn’t. Longos sponsored a research lab at the University of Guelph where researchers constructed a simulated store environment that used eye-tracking technology to study shoppers’ visual focus in an effort to gain insights into consumer decision-making in 2018. And eye tracking studies are increasingly commonplace, but in focus groups with consent. Often, companies review camera footage from self-checkout kiosks to study interface UX effectiveness and ads. Grocers like Loblaw and Pattison Food Group work with companies like Eagle Eye, which recently announced an AI-powered platform for retailers that tracks responses to promotions. Earlier this year, American grocer Kroger denied that they would be using facial recognition to influence pricing decisions and last year, Australians balked at front-facing cameras at Coles and Woolworths. 

We are used to surveillance in commercial contexts being explicit - bulky CCTV cameras and warnings that ‘you are on camera!’ But we haven’t deeply considered whether the passive and near-constant participation in data-surveillant marketing practices is a ‘fair term’ of the exchange. A camera can determine whether we scanned or purchased an item, but that security-based bargain is fundamentally different from attempting to capture our innermost feelings in the moment. 

Walmart recently added body cameras for staff to wear. This commercialization of defence technology is not a good sign(!), and regulators are catching on. Quebec’s biometric bill requires that organisations must notify the government of the use of biometric processes at least 60 days prior to the creation of a biometric database. As a result, firms are grappling with how to comply or whether they should simply leave Quebec’s market out of their eye-tracking plans. That said, how different is tracking someone’s gaze from monitoring their mouse strokes? 

If surrendering the many nuances conveyed by our faces is a new part of participating in an audience or engaging in the economy, it’s time to push back against that greedy violation. We can still turn that frown upside down (*for more than seven minutes). 

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🎙️ The Globe and Mail podcast that I host, Lately, will be back for a third season in January. In the meantime, you can catch up on the conversations we had this fall:

• Is self-optimization self destructive?

• The $300B industry where almost nobody makes money

• The great decline of everything online

• Diary of a wartime CEO

• The rise and rise of private equity

• Is that your last cigarette?

• Some personal news: LinkedIn is weird now

• The masculinity industry that shaped the US election

🎙️ The CIGI podcast that I co-host, Policy Prompt - all about long-form interviews on transformative technology and policy stuff - also has some great content to catch up on.

• How every computer is a Chinese computer (Thomas Mullaney)

• Siri, tell us about human rights and robot wrongs (Susie Alegre)

*Rizzle Kicks has a new album coming out called Competition is for Losers. Here’s one of their singles.

Last week, Rogers acquired a controlling stake in the Maple Leafs, Raptors, TFC, and the Argonauts. This announcement of changing ownership from one ‘telecom’ to another inspired grumbling about market structure in Canada. We lamented the apparent corporate capture that has come to characterise the country, and crossed our fingers that Bell’s TSN would maintain access to those games.  And earlier this week, Live Nation announced that a new large-scale music venue for Toronto would be called ‘Rogers Stadium.’ Another round of memes began anew.

The good news is that Canadians are picking up on how corporate power and company ownership is reshaping the country. Ultimately, the announcement was a helpful reminder that large firms are rarely ‘one’ type of company anymore. We tend to think of Rogers as primarily a telecommunications company, but it is a company comprised of many diverse assets across varying industries. In entertainment, Rogers owns a podcast network and television and radio stations; services that capitalise on the company’s physical infrastructure. The company also has a subsidiary, ‘Rogers Bank,’ which allows the company to gather greater detail about customer purchasing habits through their credit card offerings. Search the app store and you will find two mobile applications, one for smart home monitoring and the other for TV. 

Rogers’ recent sports acquisition further complexifies the company’s diverse holdings. But when sports fans were expressing disappointment, they may have overlooked a less appreciated and a more subtle shift that mirrors the growing “everythingness” of our telecom companies: Telus recently launched an energy-saving software service as part of its smart-home tech push. The Logic reported that the company is developing an all-in-one app for managing a range of energy tasks that occur at home, like security systems and EV charging. Again, we toss around Telus as a ‘telecommunications’ company, but it is also active in the health, IT, and agriculture spaces, is building rental housing, and has an investment arm that invests in startups. It’s totally intriguing, and we tend to forget about it.

These structures challenge the trope of Canada being a handful of companies in a trenchcoat. Perhaps - ahead of retiring the tired cliche altogether - we should start asking about the constellation of assets underneath each company’s cinched trench. This would allow us to be more realistic about how the composition of companies challenges our traditional approaches to competition policy. Right now, enforcers are reliant on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICs), which the Competition Bureau has acknowledged that these “do not align with the usual practices of competition law analysis and enforcement.” These codes classify companies in single industries, but today’s biggest companies often collect assets across industries, becoming everything companies.

That’s part of why we need to get beyond counting the number of companies in a particular sector, because that approach rarely offers the full picture. When we think of adding more competitors into the mix to solve a sector-specific challenge, that obscures just how difficult it will be for a new telecommunication entrant to compete head on with an ‘everything’ firm.

Concentrations of ownership don’t just happen at the company level, but also at the shareholder level. Legal scholar Allan Hutchison has determined that “around 80 per cent of all publicly traded corporations in Canada are controlled by a handful of people; this compares with about 20 per cent in the United States.” His research also shows that, because of a preponderance of dual-class share structures which have super voting rights, 70 per cent of Canadian corporations are “controlled by one or a number of related shareholders.” This essentially leads to mini-monopolies in ownership, where corporate governance is similarly constrained in its ability to offer effective democratic oversight.  

Large companies are more complex than we immediately appreciate. The sprawling ownership of assets means that there is so much more than meets the eye when we make an appeal to ‘adding foreign competitors’ to solve our competition woes. And the concentration in ownership of companies means that only a few people are making business decisions that affect everyone. 

Big isn’t bad, but Canadians have long bemoaned our telecoms giants - maybe for the wrong reasons. We need to recognize how the composition of large companies has changed, and how these new realities may deter new entrants from entering markets.. We now have the tools to hold our largest companies accountable under a strengthened Competition Act, passed unanimously through Parliament this year and last. But will we use them? As a reviewer for our book, The Big Fix told us “if we are going to let Rogers have a monopoly, the least they can do is give us a winning baseball team.” 

Denise Hearn and I are going on 'tour’ next month with The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians. We’d love to see you at one of the following events:

October 15^th – Vancouver – UBC Robson Square with Paul Haavardsrud (register)

October 16^th -  Edmonton at Audrey’s Books with Andrew Leach at 7.00 (no registration)

October 24^th – Montreal – Omni Hotel, 5.00 pm w/ Justin Ling (register)

October 29^th – Toronto – TIFF Lightbox, 5.00 pm w/ Nam Kiwanuka (register)

October 31^st – Toronto - Lunch time talk at the Dais, Hallowe’en theme (register) 🎃

November 13^th – Ottawa, 7.00 pm at Perfect Books, by invitation with CIGI (email me!)

Lately is back! This week’s episode is all about how a brutal business model still keeps attracting good people in a bad economy, with Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Jane Marie.

Last week’s was all about the how productivity apps are popping up in our personal lives, and what we might miss when we try to optimize our life at home, with British author and journalist Oliver Burkeman. He tries to help us build a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

My column this month in the Globe and Mail is about the expansion of algorithmic wage discrimination.

AND (!) I’m co-hosting a weekly tech policy show with Paul Samson, the President of CIGI. Our first episode is with Stanford’s Marietje Schaake about her new book, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. This Monday’s episode is a banger on the influencer economy. 😉

A federal judge in the US recently ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. The decision is a pivotal ruling that challenges the dominance of tech giants in the current digital age, and has the potential to transform their business practices. It could be that we’ve simply taken for granted that the norms of these companies - how they ‘work’ - is inevitable, even magical. 

But that doesn’t have to be the case. For instance, Apple’s infamous 30% app store commission has been challenged by the EU’s recent implementation of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA requires major companies with substantial market power, such as Apple, to make their platforms more open to competition. For all apps that are still distributed through Apple’s App store, Apple plans to reduce this standard commission from 30% to 17%, a win for developers in the EU. Companies like Spotify and Epic Games, which have criticised Apple’s fees and restrictions, are pushing for similar changes in other markets. 

This 30% commission has become almost a standard feature of the platform ecosystem. The App Store’s near-standard 30 percent cut is echoed by Google Play, the Galaxy Store, and Amazon’s App Store, while Amazon-owned Twitch takes a 50 percent cut of subscription fees and a cut of advertising. But what if it’s actually more of a bug? As policy support for sector-specific price controls grows, regulators should consider capping these kinds of digital tolls below 30%.

In Canada, we’ve actually done this before - but tentatively. During the pandemic when indoor dining was banned, the province of Ontario experimented with a time and place-bound policy intervention that capped the percentage fee that food delivery apps take in order to bring it down from 30 percent and protect small businesses. This is an example of a novel policy experimentation that should be revisited. 

Research has shown that these fee margins do not decline after the entrance of a competitor, which defies traditional economic logic. Firms like Uber, Lift, Deliveroo, Skip the Dishes, the Apple and Google App stores often charge a 30 percent commission as middlemen between consumers and suppliers, without clear economic rationale. Research by the American Economic Liberties Project’s MoeTkacik documented that delivery apps have so few competitors that their small market can create de-facto collusion. As a result, the thirty percent commission that delivery apps charge has become a persistent norm, instead of a fee that is reduced by the introduction of a new entrant. The relationship is the exact opposite of what traditional economic theory would predict.  

A recent report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) shows that Amazon now takes 45 percent of all third-party sales on its website, controlling a “monopoly tollbooth” with a range of fees imposed on sellers. These fees now make up a significant portion of Amazon’s revenue, and ILSR estimated it would earn roughly $185 billion from seller fees in 2023. To put it in context, this is more than double what Amazon Web Services (AWS) earned in revenue in 2023 – $91 billion globally. These taxes are passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices, and they cut into the profits of sellers. Considering a cap (price-controlling) these digital fees would be a market intervention that addresses this expensive digital reality of platform-based competition.   

In recognition of the insanity of fees to access markets and the ability of firms with market power to increase these with impunity, Canada’s recent voluntary Grocery Code of Conduct hopes to curb arbitrary increases to the litany of tolls that suppliers pay grocers. But the code does not offer a structural policy solution. This structural issue would benefit from more direct regulation on the issue of how reasonable the fees are in the first place.  

Platform fees are the price of participation for other businesses in the digital economy. Online platforms have shifted the world we live and work in, and these platforms treat themselves to a significant cut for the privilege. Decision-makers could challenge the 30 percent commission’s pervasiveness by reframing it as what it actually is: a business-to-business junk fee. This would be good policy for consumers, developers, and businesses and individuals that rely on this digital infrastructure to sell their goods. Canada is already taking a stand against junk fees in the banking, telecommunications and airline sectors and has expanded this work through the Office of Consumer Affairs. A natural next step is to consider how and whether these fees - structured as a commission - manifest online and cap them to correct for the market failure that has allowed that 30% fee to become so sticky. Maybe these fees are monopolist, after all.

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Earlier this week, Denise and I got to chat with the Big Story podcast about what’s next for Canada when it comes to rejuvenating competition. They have an awesome series this week on FIXING things - check it out.

Last week (sorry, I’m behind!) we closed out the inaugural season of Lately with a conversation about the relationship between our vibes and the direction of the economy with Kyla Scanlon. I loved jamming with her.

We’re running some encores of our all-time fave episodes and today it’s The ADHD Economy. Our guest Daniel Kolitz was full of energy. Tons of stuff went wrong when we were recording, but he made it fun and not stressful. It was divine.

PS. I’ll be on CBC’s Just Asking tomorrow afternoon and it’s a call in show (!!). CALL! We’re going to talk about telecom stuff, but in a cool way.

I’m app-ed out. 

It feels like I need an app for everything: my washing machine has an app, so does my fridge, my oven, the microwave, and the front door lock. These systems don’t just dialogue with me, but they communicate back to their parent companies with aggregated data on my weird household habits with the hypothesis that this ‘data’ will somehow be illuminating. While owning these ‘smart’ tools is our choice, it’s getting harder to acquire ‘dumb’ appliances. 

When (or honestly, IF) I leave my house, apps abound. If you want to pay for parking, you use an app. Rent a bike? App. Buy a coffee? Mobile order ahead on your app or you feel like a loser that waits in line. That experience, while certainly convenient at times, is also ensnaring, and the random offers can be disorienting. Paying by app isn’t just about ease, it can be a subtle form of digital consumer captivity. 

This new lack of choice is dressed up as a time saver in an abundant app ecosystem. A lot of the time, we’ve Trojan-horsed surveillant pricing as a feature of our everyday economy, tucking personalised prices into our pocket without really realizing it. The Executive Director of Groundwork, Lindsay Owens, has said that this pricing strategy allows firms to spy on you, isolate you, and then overcharge. A recent report from The American Prospect surveyed how digital surveillance and customer isolation are individualising the prices that we pay. When we order ahead, we don’t necessarily see a common price point, and the shifting combination of personalised loyalty further unmoors us from economic reality. 

Starbucks has called the ability to place your order in advance, “experiential convenience.” As other fast-food retailers mimic this shift, third places are shrinking, which also keeps people separated. The adoption of self- and pre- order technologies can also mean that these firms employ fewer people. But these negative externalities are just adjacent to the core problem.  

As we take on the work of placing our own orders and bemoan the ongoing erosion of third places (no more comfy seats at Starbucks!), order-ahead apps are hoovering up our data, gamifying our purchasing through ‘loyalty’ programs, and introducing an unfortunate price blindness. The transactional shift has been subtle: Starbucks began testing mobile payments in 2009, and now Domino’s calls itself a ‘technology company that sells pizzas.’ Some retailers are testing an AI bot that haggles with customers over price, turning a purchase into an active negotiation with a computer program. George McGowan, a software engineer, recently used a chatbot from UK Mattress company Eve Sleep to negotiate an 8% discount on a mattress. Everyone loves a bargain, but it feels like in-app purchasing is really more of an exhausting fun house than a time-saver.    

Other pioneers of the invasive and ‘personalized’ app experience include Tim Horton’s (PS the Privacy Commissioner found that they tracked too much personal information), Subway, and McDonald’s. But these apps can only dream of the scale of China-based aggregated ordering apps like Meituan and Eleme. These super apps, often cited as inspiration in tech circles, shift away from in-person payment and allow users to pay through AliPay, WeChat Pay, or a Digital RMB Wallet (a central bank digital currency that is issued by China’s central bank). Here in Canada, the Bank of Canada has argued that a digital loonie is ‘likely’ necessary to maintain monetary sovereignty as cash declines - which will mean we have another digital payment method in the future. More recently, Canada’s biggest banks have partnered with Interac to create a payment system called KONEK, which is essentially their version of Apple Pay - and another payment app. More mobile payment options shouldn’t mean we lose the ability to pay in-person with other methods, and it doesn’t need to mean that we can’t access a predictable price. This is what we are losing in the appification of everything.   

In the US, the FTC just issued orders to eight companies, seeking information on the mechanics of surveillant pricing. The regulator is concerned that as more retailers use digital tools to do business with consumers, they have a greater ability to set person-specific prices, and they are seeking to better understand how this pricing is enabled by intermediaries like Accenture and McKinsey. In Canada, we seem reluctant to acknowledge this uncomfortable new reality, though the Competition Bureau just obtained a court order to advance an ongoing investigation into Kalibrate’s gas pricing services. ⛽

The focus that firms place on efficiency and driving sales volume has not only degraded the quality of our purchasing experience, but increasingly, our payment options are being constrained while pricing is plucked from a software program. This paradigm shift in payments invites a proactive and protective policy response. Consumers need the right to verify a predictable, stable price, and they deserve the right to access modest discounts outside of an app environment. We can think of apps as a language that we use to access commerce. This language should expand our options and not constrain them. We may need laws that protect our flexibility when we pay - not only ensuring a cash option, but not restricting access to products or services through an app. For instance, QR codes are another payment method that should complement, but not replace cash or card. 

Payment and pricing shouldn’t be discriminatory. Businesses are likely to push for their right to set and calibrate their own price, and tune these prices based on a range of inputs. But consumers also need better rights here, and deserve access to a stable price - or at least the ability to more explicitly declare the boundaries of their willingness to pay; instead of being part of a constant, live in-app economics experiment. There is a role for the state to ensure basic transparency and introduce more accountability from firms that are micro-tailoring prices in secret. If only there were an app for that.

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🎙️ This week’s episode of Lately looks at how technology is changing our taste (for better, and for worse) with the brilliant and daring Berlin-based author and critic Lauren Oyler.

📕 The Big Fix is available for pre-order through Sutherland House. regs to riches readers get 25% off with the code: BIGFIX25.

The book will be out in October, and Denise Hearn and I will be in Vancouver (October 15), Montreal (October 22), and Toronto (October 29) to offer three different lectures on the book with very cool moderators. We’d love to meet you and catch up. Mark your calendars! 📅

Pre-Order the Big Fix

🎨 PS. The cover is by the wonderful artist Kat Jaynes.

It’s every little girl’s dream: a horse. (*That, and becoming a marine biologist).

Recently, those dreams have been coming true a little more often. 

When equestrians meet the kids of generation Harry Potter, you get hobby horsing - or “vegan horse riding” where people compete on a fake horse. Think: broom stick with a stuffed animal on the top. Lately, this is all over TikTok. One viral video saw people mocking a teenage girl who was tired from the physicality of the competition. But perhaps the joke is on them: the athleticism (running and jumping) is similar to hurdles on a track. The horse isn’t real, but the physicality sure is. 

The sport initially became popular in Finland in 2002 and has more recently been popularised on TikTok. You can get a cute hobby horse on Etsy for less than a hundred bucks. It’s the ethical democratisation of an elite, expensive sport. But it’s also wonderfully ridiculous. And for that reason, I think it’s important to take hobby horsing seriously.

As the world of sport expands, it’s getting way weirder. But before we had quadball (formerly Quidditch) were were already accepting ‘sports’ that blurred lines, like colour guard and rhythmic gymnastics (that’s one where people dance with a ribbon on a stick). Now we cheer for extreme ironing, toe wrestling, shin kicking, chess boxing and even watch people slap each other in the face “professionally.” We also watch people play video games and guess world locations from a digital image. Plus, we tolerate ceding tennis court space to pickleballs. 

Hobby horsing challenges us to stop pretending that you need a real horse to be riding one with its amusing absurdity. We could probably learn something from the camaraderie among these young enthusiasts who are taking the concept beyond a fun sleepover activity. In their dedication, they’re reminding us that tradition doesn’t dictate what sport is, or isn’t, or whom it's for. By reinventing and reclaiming horseback riding in their backyards and basements, they are asserting themselves in a way that I admire so much. Gallop, girls! Yeehaw. 

Other knock offs of elite sport are also obvious echos, like mini putt to golf and go karting to Formula 1. Who decides whether these are hobbies, activities, or sports?

There are other elite institutions that need to be incrementally and unironically remade to welcome new spectators, like the ballet, opera, polo, and sailing. But that remaking is reliant on an audience that’s willing to embrace the strange. The hobby horses are leading the way.

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🛒 Last year Canada brought supermarket CEOs to Ottawa and asked them - politely - to consider ways that they could stabilise grocery prices. While the Grocery Code of Conduct was being considered, legislators have been courageous in modernising the Competition Act through a series of updates (yay!).

Why is the code national? The conduct of the grocery industry is regulated as ‘commerce,’ making industry-specific legislation a provincial domain. The initiative wanted to avoid the noise of different regulatory environments. That makes sense, but it sort of sucks that we’re getting so hyped about what is essentially a handshake deal.

My co-author Denise Hearn and I wrote about this in the Globe and Mail.

While we shouldn’t celebrate scraps, that doesn’t mean we can’t make them count. The Code of Conduct isn’t quite past its best-before date, yet. Now it’s time to enshrine the core principles of this voluntary code in legislation.

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🎙️ In the most recent Lately episode, I got to speak with Simon Houpt about how repressive regimes and big brands use sports to clean up their image.

The best idea that humans have had to address the inherent information asymmetry of online consumption (whereby the seller knows much more about the quality of the product than the prospective buyer) has been to rely on each other through reviews. Lately, that ubiquitous system of crowd-sourced reviews has been letting us down - big time. A process built on the wisdom of crowds that once held so much promise has now become fantastically polluted; bombarded by bots, randomly weaponized by special interest groups and fans, and gated by companies that want to prevent a negative review from making its way online. The ability of generative AI to compose authentic-sounding reviews has created a battlefield. And yet we continue to rely on reviews when we make decisions about what to buy, where to eat, what to read, and where to go even when we know they are unreliable. Why?

I dig into this in the first episode of “lately,” a new podcast from the Globe and Mail that I’m hosting. This post is a short essay companion, NOT a transcript of the show.

🎙️ Listen to lately

Online reviews began in the late 90s as an echo of blog comments and a way to build comfort with the once radical act of uploading your credit card details to a website. Amazon even briefly employed people to write book reviews on the site to establish credibility. Once trust was established and a new norm emerged, online reviews empowered consumers to make the best possible choice with the information available to them. But it’s beyond time to question the unacknowledged power of this scheme. 

As the trustworthiness of reviews has declined, third party review sites like the New York Times’ Wirecutter have emerged as an authoritative antidote. But this journalistic method can be compromised if affiliate marketing deals aren’t disclosed. Plus, remember when Sports Illustrated published AI-generated product reviews under fake author names with fake author biographies? We’ve tried to compensate for the unreliability of reviews, but it doesn’t always work. 

Reviews are emotional for shoppers and stressful for businesses. Falsified ones are annoying for platforms. The structure of the feedback economy means that the discoverability of small businesses, artists, and authors hinges on the reviews associated with their work. In December 2020, Etsy sellers were being punished with one-star reviews when their items didn’t ship as quickly as the norm set by Amazon, which caused their shops to plummet in search.  In an effort to restore the reliability of reviews and better protect consumers from fabrications, governments are attempting to curb their fakery by relying on the familiar antitrust provisions of false and misleading advertising protections.  

The EU has banned fake online consumer reviews, and the UK government recently passed legislation to make it illegal to pay someone to write a fake review, to offer to submit, commission or facilitate one, and to host a review without taking steps to check that it is real. This follows a similar legal ban in Ireland. The FTC is currently taking public input on a proposed rule to ban fake reviews, while Canada’s Competition Bureau recently issued a warning about companies using employees to post fake reviews. 

The technology to detect fake reviews is a work in progress. Still, companies have obvious incentives to invest in the trust-worthiness of their platforms. The Coalition for Trusted Reviews unites Amazon, Booking.com, Expedia Group, Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, and Trustpilot in aiming to stop fake reviews at the source. Yelp has started naming and shaming businesses that pay for five-star reviews. TripAdvisor offers a transparency report that discloses the number of reviews removed by automated checks, the number referred to human moderators, and the number that  those moderators may approve. Google recently shared that it took down 45% more fake reviews in 2023 thanks to a new algorithm. Amazon has filed lawsuits against actors advertising and selling fake reviews, and has sued the administrators of more than 10,000 Facebook groups that it alleges were coordinating bogus reviews in exchange for money or free products. Trustpilot has implemented measures to detect and prevent fake or biassed reviews, such as using automated systems and human moderators to monitor and verify them. In this way, combating artificial reviews offers a test of online content policing, a space where companies are eager to comply and invest in combating fakeness.  

We can take extra care as consumers, installing FakeSpot (by Mozilla) to our web browser and quickly analysing Amazon product reviews to filter out ones that may be unnatural using ReviewMeta. Businesses can get a transparency report to identify reviews that may be fake, and many firms take efforts to ‘verify’ reviews and remove random ones. The vibe very much remains whack-a-mole,but regulators aren’t totally on the sidelines. In December, Montreal-based company AmpMe was fined $1.5M for buying fake reviews. An investigation found that the firm bought positive reviews from third parties to promote its app, and concluded that these reviews created a false or misleading general impression. Given the incentives of glowing reviews for businesses, can we really blame AmpMe for trying?  

A US-based academic developed an algorithm to analyse the language of fake reviews after examining how the language used can reveal whether or not the reviewer has actually tried the product. Perhaps this tool could be applied to Temu, which often has 10-110x more reviews than Amazon, almost all of which are five-stars according to analysis from Professor Joe Reagle. The volume of reviews defies logic. It’s theatre now. 

At the same time, the activity of writing an actual review is a form of pro bono labour that some engage in as a way to advise strangers or to feel heard. Some do reject reviews and go elsewhere for a gut check on the quality of an item, asking for input on forums like Reddit or Facebook, but there are (of course) already concerns of fakery on Reddit. Even Google scholar is manipulatable - recent research found that citations can be bought in bulk. Review aggregators like Yelp, Goodreads, and Rotten Tomatoes face similar challenges. 

This power of people still characterises digital decisions: an honest pledge from a peer has motivated the growth of online influencers, and set a norm for a generation that is predisposed to shop online and heed a referral from someone they follow. Social commerce has lessened the friction of evaluating a prospective purchase, allowing people to quickly click through social media to make a purchase. Yet these referrals are also vulnerable to a lack of disclosure that a recommended item has been gifted or that the recommender receives a portion of the sales that they drive.  

Reviews have warped reality at the same time that they continue to shape the digital economy by factoring heavily into search engine optimization (SEO), brand equity, and revenue. The question is whether it’s futile to even try to fight back. Governments can try to enforce more explicit rules against fake and misleading material, companies can make efforts to remove fake reviews, and we can ingest reviews with the grain of salt that they deserve as we try to optimise purchasing decisions. But that may not be enough to stop the deluge of posts deliberately intended to mislead and coax us into clicking on something that sucks. If anything, it’s incredible that we continue to treat the mechanism of reviews as having any credibility at all. In a way, turning consumers into constant critics is maybe the greatest online sham and we’re all complicit. For that, you gotta give the system all five stars, baby. 

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BTW, the Globe and Mail has a new weekly newsletter - also called lately! - it’s a review of what’s new in the new economy, written by Sam Edwards. Subscribe here or via the button below.

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🗞️ Earlier this week, I had an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail. I point to provincial policy opportunity to better protect children that perform their lives online.

📻 I was also on The Big Story podcast, talking about how ‘more’ or ‘better’ competition is about so much more than just counting the number of competitors. *Doesn’t mean I don’t love Trader Joe snacks!

A recent CBC Marketplace exploration informed by former employees detailed how Value Village uses (or used) a computer system to suggest prices for home goods that are - at least in some cases - higher than what their product is sold for new by other retailers. These surreal discrepancies were being shared on social media with a mix of wonder and disgust. 

The rapacious tactic is less of an instance of information asymmetry and more of a cunning violation of the core premise of second-hand discount shopping; namely, the implicit bargain that the prices of items on the shelves is lower than it would be if it were offered new, elsewhere. People don’t have a universe of prices in their heads, so instead we tend to take references seriously - there’s a psychological effect of basic anchoring that is being abused.

Paying more than the market rate for a used item [at VALUE VILLAGE!] is a pretty raw deal. At the same time, if there is more of a demand for these items, then the ‘market’ should be able to efficiently command the best price possible - even one that is set aspirationally or arbitrarily. But that idealised dynamic just isn’t what’s at play at that thrift store. They’re literally just tricking people, and exploiting the trust of their clientele. Gross! 

You could also argue that consumers need to be more vigilant, and use the information and tools available to them to check the value of the presumed bargain in order to ensure that it’s even a deal in the first place and avoid deception. It does seem that the public’s growing intolerance of excessive pricing and scepticism of markups could inspire more price checking in real-time. But I wonder if it’s reasonable to expect people to constantly do this in the first place, especially when they’re already explicitly engaging in an activity of frugality. 

Regulators should ensure businesses are not earning profits through indiscriminate gouging of consumers, while also addressing the increasingly unknowable aspects of price determination that lead to a sense of powerlessness and culminate in public anger. We should also pay closer attention to instances where the goodwill of less privileged people is deliberately extorted. 

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Ontario has long-had legislation to prevent price-gouging in situations of crisis. Canada’s Competition Act now includes ‘excessive pricing’ as an anti-competitive act. But this change - which the Bureau notably did not advocate for - does not yet clarify when and how a price is ‘excessive.’

It’s not new to score a little more off people who have less. In the US, Co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance Stacey Mitchell recently released a report suggesting that dollar chains use predatory tactics while targeting vulnerable communities. Her research suggests that these chains deploy a deliberate tactic whereby they go into poor neighbourhoods where people don’t have many other options and then incrementally mark up the prices, sneaking profit from low-income consumers with limited options. 

Accruing profit isn’t by nature ‘bad.’ But competition law generally cares about the strategies that companies deploy in pursuit of that surplus. We take seriously the conduct that allows gains to be made, and decide what’s fair, what’s not, all in the name of what kind of competition we want. 

Value Village is a for-profit company that buys merchandise from non-profits. It competes with non-profit thrift stores that donate most of their revenue to those in need, and other informal secondary marketplaces like garage sales or Facebook Marketplace. The chain capitalises on the good intentions of people who donate their used goods for resale to create wealth. 

Value Village’s parent company, Savers, was acquired by private equity firms in March 2019. The firm has twice been accused of misleading the public: first, that they inflate the percentage that they pay to non-profit charities that partner with the company, and second, for potentially leading the public to believe the organisation is a charity. While neither lawsuit stuck, they are a reminder of how the firm appeals to the premise of charitableness in order to profit. 

We don’t have a legal penalty for breaking social contracts, but the consignment marketplace could ‘discipline’ the stores by choosing not to go there and others may cease to donate used goods. There’s also a fundamentally moral element to pricing that helps explain why we react to this story with revulsion. *For more on taking advantage of consumer expectations to price gouge, see this Brian Callaci piece on the macaroni riots. 🍝

It seems obvious that the firm is not quite what it purports to be, especially given its willingness to subvert shoppers’ legitimate assumptions about second-hand pricing guaranteeing a reasonable discount, and substituting that with a sneaky markup. Which raises a bigger question: 

🏬 What do we value in our ‘village’?

Consumers deserve to know when and how algorithms are used to generate prices, and this basic transparency shouldn’t be limited to secondary marketplaces. Value Village is absolutely welcome to brazenly rip off shoppers in the name of capitalism and relentless pursuit of profit. They should just be obligated to be a little more up-front about it so that we don’t need to find out second-hand. 

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🗞️ I wrote about what [provincial] policy people should take away from the rejoicing re: Manulife and Shopper’s undoing their agreement in this weekend’s Report on Business (spoiler: there is more they can do, we should talk about it). 👇

There’s also a longer piece about how exclusive deals between insurance companies and pharmacies are becoming more prevalent in Canada. In the US, the Biden administration is ‘cracking down’ on pharmacy middleman, but they are very powerful (learn more in Fortune).

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Lately Canadians have been lamenting Loblaw, but for the wrong reasons. 

It was recently revealed in a rare House of Commons zinger that a primary advisor to federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is also a registered lobbyist for the grocery giant Loblaw (specifically in the province of Ontario). 

This revelation came as the public was grappling with the announcement that one of the country's largest insurance companies, Manulife (Canada’s largest insurance company) had struck an exclusive deal with Loblaw-owned Shoppers Drug Mart to provide specialty drugs. Many contested the logic of an arrangement referred to as ‘preferred pharmacy network’ (PPN) when it otherwise sounded like some sort of anti-competitive lock-in. The Canadian Anti-Monopoly project has suggested that it’s possible the deal would trigger section 90.1 of the Competition Act, which deals with agreements or arrangements that prevent or lessen competition unduly, and the arrangement has since been dissolved. 

The resultant vibe was that Loblaw was undermining our choice. Why do we keep reading about how we have less competition, and the need to get more? 

A report from the Competition Bureau last year confirmed - and substantiated - what was already well known: Canada’s grocery sector lacks competition. It is characterised by three domestic chains: Loblaw, Metro, and Empire (Sobeys) and two foreign players: Wal-Mart and Costco. These firms voluntarily complied with the Bureau’s study, but many have criticised the grocers for not being fully forthcoming about the composition of their business. Since the report was released, initial amendments to the Competition Act have been proposed. One of these grants the Competition Commissioner with market study powers - the ability to compel specific information from businesses. This means that if the Bureau conducted the study again today, it would be able to directly parse the accounts of the major grocers. Indeed, the Minister of Science, Innovation, and Economic Development has urged the Competition Bureau to conduct a followup study of grocery prices; likely motivated by the grocer’s reluctance to comply with the Minister’s request that they work creatively to stabilise food prices.   

Still, social media was aflame; circulating price comparisons of food flyers from 2019 that contrasted the large price leaps that have occurred over the past five years. This general sense of fury expressed online prompted a Canadian economist to wonder out loud what the big deal was. After all, people can just shop at a Loblaw competitor. 

But is this true? Can Canadians simply take their business elsewhere?

In assessing the vitality of various sectors, analysts have become somewhat obsessed with simply counting the number of competitors. The relationship is straightforward: less competitors means more concentration. But this superficial assessment fundamentally ignores how companies have changed over time, and the reality of how they behave.  

Loblaw isn’t just a grocery company. It’s a company with diverse revenue streams that produce an ecosystem of financial assets.  Loblaw is a landlord through its REIT. It offers bank-like financial services through PC Financial. It offers for-profit virtual healthcare through Maple and wants to move further into primary care in Alberta (pharmacy care clinics). It has a venture capital arm, as do many companies today, that invests in technologies that could benefit the company in e-commerce, healthcare, and food sectors. All this occurs in tandem with its impressive suite of private label products, and a loyalty program that drives consumer spend. 

The Minister has shared that he is courting more competitors, such as German multinational Aldi. Even if such a firm were to set up shop here, it would only compete with Loblaw in one regard: food. The “bring a foreign competitor to market” narrative simplifies a more complex picture – pitting a Canadian conglomerate against a dominant and fast-growing multinational grocer.

Less glamorous than courting another company but with high potential is the clumsy policy progress being made on the prospective grocery code of conduct, which will bring transparency to the agri-food supply chain and help us understand where and when price markups from suppliers are being passed onto consumers. Of course, the public shouldn’t give a free pass to food manufacturers passing on price increases or shrinkflation. But without the data, people default to reflecting their resentment to the supermarket itself. 

👻 If people are looking for a place to redirect their annoyance and helplessness, they should be haunted by Kleenex exiting Canada last year. A company that is ~literally~ synonymous with tissues decided that the cost of competing in this country wasn’t worth it. But a closer look suggests that the firm was aggressively price disciplined by competitors’ private label tissue offerings, like Costo’s Kirkland brand, Wal-Mart’s Great Value or Loblaw’s No Name or President’s Choice brands. The big ‘grocers’ may have chased the eponymous firm away.  

The big grocery stores have repeatedly insisted that their grocery business has small margins, and I believe them. But their ability to cross-subsidize their business lines, manipulate consumer behaviour through loyalty offers, and direct competition with their suppliers needs to be acknowledged when we seek to assess the terms of competition. 

Canadians are still pushing politicians to do more for us to moderate the price of food. We found a ‘villain’ - Loblaw, Galen Weston - and are hoping for a hero - a new competitor with transformative competition powers - BUT Aldi and Trader Joe’s (*which is owned by Aldi)  are just grocers - albeit with their own suite of private label brands.

We’re mistakenly framing this as a battle of global conglomerates and not retail grocers. Our regulatory and political regimes are not up to the task of meeting the complexity and the changes that are occurring in markets. 

Expecting another grocery to come to Canada with the capacity to meaningfully compete [head on] with a firm like Loblaw is fantasy. We need to be more realistic about how these firms have evolved and how they compete if we expect new entrants to be able to go head to head. We need the competition conversation in Canada to make how markets and companies operate today.  

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This post is my way of telling you that I am working on a book project with the incredible Denise Hearn (!).

It is widely acknowledged that Canada has a competition problem:

• A recent Competition Bureau report found Canada’s competitive intensity in decline; 

• Concentration in half of Canadian industries has increased by 40% since 1998 and one-third of Canadian industries saw concentration increase by over 50%;

• Almost 80 per cent of all publicly traded corporations in Canada are controlled by a handful of people; this compares with about 20 percent in the United States. The dynastic family wealth in Canada is largely oligarchic: the Irvings, Westons, Rogers, and Thomson families exert subtle yet profound power in the everyday lives of Canadians; 

• Publicly traded Canadian firms in highly concentrated industries have also seen a significant increase in profitability. This is likely driven by firms’ ability to extract higher prices, and not efficiency gains; 

• Canadian firms historically under-invest in research and development (“R&D”). It may be that a latent lack of competition means that they simply aren’t compelled to take on the work of actually innovating; 

• A recent survey found that most Canadians say we need more competition as it’s too easy for big businesses to take advantage of consumers, and a majority of those surveyed agreed that more competition between businesses will lead to better quality products and more innovation in Canada. 

More and more of the economy – from funeral services to movie theatres – is controlled by only a few companies. As a result of this shift, de facto private regulators – in the form of the largest and most powerful corporations – now set market rules and norms outside of more democratic channels. They decide what we buy, how we work, and what the government is able to provide. This lack of market competition hurts workers, consumers, innovation, small businesses, and Canada’s growth prospects.

The economy has changed. But the conversation about competition in Canada hasn’t, really. We’re still obsessively counting the number of competitors in different sectors while ignoring the realities of how markets and companies have evolved over time. We also consistently fail to appreciate the strategic and potentially anti-competitive business tactics that the largest firms often pioneer, which are then mimicked and replicated by smaller players and peers as a means of survival. As these practices diffuse across the economy, enshrining new norms, consumers are worse off.

But, a new movement is emerging, led in part by a stronger, more aggressive Competition Bureau, and in part by concerned citizens realising the importance of competition policy for scaffolding market structure, affecting everything from startup rates, to wages, to high consumer prices, and systems fragility. 

Many are hanging their hat on the impending changes to Canada’s competition law, the Competition Act, as the silver bullet to solving our longstanding legal loopholes which have made it difficult for regulators to have much authority. However, markets are public creations, and have guardrails which should be democratically determined. One law is insufficient alone to deal with the complex market realities of the 21st century, including: the financialization of firms, the rise of private equity, digital markets and platforms, artificial intelligence, data pools and privacy, sustainability-related market challenges, and many others. 

Competition policy cannot solve all issues, but it is a foundational legal framework that intersects nearly every other legal regime. Our book aims to celebrate the wins we have solidified, while continuing the momentum to tackle the many significant challenges ahead.

Today we are experiencing high levels of income inequality, sticky higher prices even as inflation slows down, low wages, and a host of other economic realities which – in part – find their origin in a lack of robust competition policy enforcement.

Competition policy took a turn in the 1970s and 1980s, attempting to become more ‘neutral’ and ‘scientific’ by elevating the role of economists in adjudicating the law. Complex econometric equations related to calculating market share, anti-competitive harms and benefits, and so on were invented to serve the interest – predominantly – of merging parties. Firms claimed that efficiency gains from mergers and acquisitions would be passed onto consumers through lower prices. But those lower prices largely failed to materialise, as concentrated private power across a range of industries only grew and companies exerted their pricing power. For example, one study in the US showed that when mergers led to six or fewer significant competitors in one industry, prices rose in 95% of cases.

Today, there is a marked turn in policy-making where the neoliberal fantasy that believed liberalised markets would solve allocation problems is eroding.

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There is now a huge debate about what replaces market fundamentalism, as we watch twin descents into anarchy or authoritarianism in many jurisdictions. The answer, however, lies in democratic liberalism – the fair structuring of markets in a way which undergirds wide prosperity and opportunity for all. Competition policy plays an important role in that restructuring.

The recent removal of the ‘efficiencies defence’ from Canada’s Competition Act articulated in Bill C-56 marks not only a technocratic legislative detail, but a marked shift in approach and philosophy. We no longer see efficiency as the northstar of competition policy in Canada.

Downgrading efficiency as a goal means there is an opportunity for Canada to lead on what competition policy is for – what its aims are – and how it might better serve the interests of all Canadians. Competition for competition’s sake is meaningless, unless it succeeds in delivering the kind of economy we want to live in – not only as consumers, but as workers, business owners, and citizens. It also means that econometric ways of analysing benefits should be better balanced against other goals like systems resiliency, quality jobs, and markets which deliver the best products and services, at reasonable prices, for consumers.

Amending the law is a great initial step, but it’s the first on a long staircase. Now the real work begins to ensure Canada maintains and strengthens its position globally, can provide living wages and decent jobs, and access to markets for innovators to grow and scale their business. Canadians don’t have to be takers of privately-imposed market regulatory regimes. We can collectively determine what markets should mean and do, for us, and set appropriate policies across a range of industries.

We’re eager to continue researching these complex, but critical issues. Some of the questions we are asking ourselves and each other in this process are: 

• What are new ways that businesses earn revenue today, including intangible and financialized forms of value? 

• How are companies utilising ecosystems of value across multiple “sectors” to reinforce their dominance in markets?

• What other industries – aside from the usual suspects: airlines, telecoms, and banking – should Canadians be worried about in terms of declining competition? 

• How can we evolve our legislative and regulatory regimes – not just in competition policy, but across different ministries and areas of law – to align Canada’s economic regime to be more innovative, competitive, and equitable?

• Where can Canada lead and provide inspiration to other jurisdictions?

Occasionally, you’ll see us kicking the tires as we share our thinking in opinion editorials, speeches, panels, and blog posts. We’re always happy to hear your perspectives too - both in terms of diagnosing the problem, and working towards productive solutions. 

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🙏 We thank McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy for this opportunity, and look forward to sharing our reflections with you in the fall. 

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The Counterbalance

Taken, not Earned

Welcome to The Counterbalance, the newsletter of the Balanced Economy Project. Oxfam gained wide global media coverage on Monday for its report Inequality Inc., a rich and powerful anti-monopoly document that breaks new ground in a grand new narrative. We are delighted to have collaborated on this, notably on Chapter 2, entitled…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · Balanced Economy Project

Advertising on digital streaming platforms is more nefarious than on cable and paying more to not see ads won't necessarily mean you're not still being taken advantage of.

There has been considerable smirking on social media after Amazon announced that its Prime Video product would be introducing advertisements starting in February. Customers in Canada may choose to pay an additional $2.99/month to avoid these promotional interruptions. The butt of most jokes seems to be the inevitable revelation that the presumed disruption and innovation of online streaming platforms was mere aspiration. Instead, they are now ‘just like cable’ - Netflix similarly introduced ads and subsequently increased their pricing in fall 2022. 

Amazon’s introduction of advertising is only superficially like cable in terms of the basic similarity: seeing advertisements of specific lengths at specific breaks. There are important differences that are obscured by this observation re: the nature of digital advertising and potential implications for competition and the subsequent sponsor-fication of the media they offer because their advertising ecosystem is so much more sophisticated. They are the closest to offering reliable ‘attribution’ - being able to tell an advertiser whether (and when) their ad ‘worked,’ because they can link datasets across their other verticals (like their flagship ecommerce platform). This activity of attribution is sometimes referred to as ‘campaign verification.’ 

On one hand, that prospect is awesome and cool for businesses that want to advertise, since on other digital platforms (like Facebook), their ad money is basically just a dressed up game of roulette. 

On the other hand, it can wind up increasing prices for consumers when firms need to start to build in substantial advertising spends, that are then passed onto people. It’s happening!

It is also worth noting just how profitable advertising has already been for Amazon online: advertising earns more money for Amazon than Amazon Prime, Prime Video, and audio and e-book subscriptions combined. In the future, it has been speculated that Amazon could sell advertiser access to its gaming platform Twitch, to live sporting events that are streamed, and audio ads on Amazon music. Their streaming TV service Freevee is already ad-supported, but that is only available in the US. 

Another reason why Amazon Prime’s ads aren’t ‘just like cable’ has to do with the nature of the information that streaming platforms are able to gather from us in order to target and calibrate subsequent advertising. They collect and analyse information on what we watch, when, and for how long - as well as what we stop watching, what we linger on - basically any passive consumptive activity as you engage. This knowledge is a little different from ‘cable’ days, since broadcasters didn’t know what else you were anticipating in their schedule,  or when you rented a video at Blockbuster, the company didn’t have a way to know or categorise every DVD box you gazed at or picked up. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Apple, ETC know what trailers we watch and what shows we ‘save for later,’ all proxies of demand/anticipation that can influence how they price ads. 

Streaming platforms use all of the information in their closed ecosystem to their own benefit. We are already seeing artificial intelligence applied to trailers, in an effort to highlight different features of a show more aligned with a viewer’s preferences. The streaming platforms can also use the information we volunteer to inform what content they might create themselves, purchase, or licence. Amazon is primed to be a juggernaut in this space: they own Goodreads, which lets them know what books people like, and why. They own the platform IMbD, which lets them know which actors and directors people like, and why. They own Kindle, which lets them know which parts of books people like, are anticipating through pre-order, and how fast they are being read. They own the smart speaker Alexa, which listens in. And of course, the company knows a whole lot about what we buy online from the everything store. 

Presuming that seeing an advertisement offered during an Amazon Prime viewing sesh is a rerun of cable’s heyday also ignores other ways that they already advertise to us. Digital product placement is a practice that has gone under-the-radar, and is rather blurry. We currently place more of a legislative onus on Instagram influencers to disclose sponsored content that we do film and television - a significant imbalance. 

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Unlike cable, video streaming platforms also algorithmically control the content that we can find, the order in which we see it, what is elevated, and what is buried. They can nudge us towards consuming content that they have produced, a tactic (“self-preferencing”)  that Amazon has already come under antitrust fire for in other jurisdictions. 

It’s worth asking what it means for a customer to signal that they are willing to pay modestly  more in order to avoid a specific kind of advertising. You may be able to pay that near-negligible premium to opt-out of seeing ads, but it won’t protect you from these other practices. You’ll still be contributing your consumptive data and endowing each firm with competitive advantages, and you’ll still be seeing super subtle product placement without ever knowing. So the question becomes: are we willing to pay much more to avoid advertising of all kinds, and how can policy help us opt-out of this kind of data collection?

Jeff Bezos once said, “advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” It’s doubtful he appreciated what Amazon could achieve through advertising when he threw that shade in 2009.   A Bank of America analysis suggests that the push into video will boost Amazon’s revenue by as much as $5B USD.

We shouldn’t equate streaming with cable, because that thinking obscures how sprawling a company like Amazon is, and how it can out-compete + change the landscape. It’s nothing to smirk at.

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Lululemon wants to buy back my old leggings, and probably yours, too. 

A few clothing firms are trying to formalise the secondary economies related to the resale of their items of dress. We’re moving from a place where the consumer is in full control of circumventing formal markets - since you can still bargain or haggle in informal resale contexts - towards more closed ecosystems. The peer-to-peer economy that has (long!) supported trading and reselling has become a new normal of sorts online thanks to eBay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and other sites. But that freedom is being tentatively challenged as some clothing companies try to recapture some of that value for themselves, because they have figured out that they can sell the same item more than once (the practice is sometimes referred to as “recommerce").  

The art of selling the exact same item to different people is perhaps most familiar with Ticketmaster’s Resale program (which officially started reselling in 2005) and the practice seems to be creeping into apparel. Canadian companies on the resale bandwagon are: Canada Goose’s Generations program, Arc’teryx ReGear, The North Face “Clothes the Loop” program, Birds of North America ReNests, Hoi Bo, and others (who am I missing!!?). 

When it comes to garments, consignment as an economic activity isn’t at all new, but it is being done in new ways. Its digital formalisation makes it a little easier to pass on your gently used duds, and the practice can potentially link into loyalty programs and associated data points collected by firms. The companies engaging in clothing buyback programs will tell you that this practice is ‘good for the environment,’ and while this is true, it is not necessary for a parent company to control their resale market in order for people to sell their clothing. Another purported benefit is that their ecosystems might combat counterfeit (which could be a legitimate desire for some, like collectors). 

Whether a firm is running a digital buyback program or facilitating reselling via a closed platform (or both), it raises the question of what it means - or meant - to ‘own’ something right now. Are we just paying a premium to borrow clothing items from companies? We aren’t quite renting them, but it can feel close. Think of Peloton’s experiment with a certified buy-back program (buyback programs give the seller funds right away, sometimes in the form of a gift card or store credit). 

It took me a second to hone in on why this micro-trend seemed concerning. There are obvious positives: more firms are integrating the circular economy to their business value, and customers can earn back some of their investment in an item while giving it new life. I’m not concerned about clothing companies reclaiming their resale economies from consignment stores or peer-to-peer platforms, and I see some positives in terms of convenience for customers. I am a bit annoyed that clothing companies engaged in these buyback schemes can take a cut of a transaction that they would not otherwise be able to access. 

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The hazard here is that these companies are able to assetize their products in a way that expands their ability to extract rent. While creative, it just doesn’t feel like an innovative business strategy. The potential harm comes from the steady erosion of rights when you purchase a product. It’s another area where we are moving from owning an item outright (property rights) to having contract rights that are always eroding. Another example of this shift is when a warranty is downgraded when you purchase an item secondhand. This disincentives the resale and discourages buying a gently used item. Right now, it doesn’t seem like shoppers have the bargaining power to push back on this shift. 

There is a natural link between the prospective loss of the ability to resell your clothes anywhere to the right to repair movement. Legislation is opening up artificial and unfair barriers that lock in purchasers to using licensed repair technicians supplied or licensed by the parent firm.The most infamous - or at least by now, hopefully familiar - example is John Deere, but also Apple’s new Self Service Repair. So it’s not new for there to be faux walls in commerce that infringe on consumer freedom. 

It is fundamentally good for people to be able to sell their used goods and recapture some of their market value. But I think the ‘right to resale’ is something we should keep our eyes on. Maybe we risk working a little bit backwards with these reselling ecosystems, pulling resale away from thrift shops, garage sales, and online platforms so that parent firms can capture the most revenue possible. It’s sort of like password sharing. We used to split Netflix subscriptions and now that’s been ‘cracked down’ on. Brand-owned resale feels like a hangover from the optimism of the sharing economy or a bad use of a blockchain.  It’s not hard to anticipate how it could grow incrementally in this inflationary period. I’m ultimately more supportive of peer-to-peer and just wonder if that ability needs to be more proactively protected.  

Resale needs to stay people-powered, and we should be wary of firms selling the same item more than once. 

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😅 This post is about both sides of the bulk question. “I’ve been bulking up”!  

The first is whether and when it can hurt people to only offer a per unit discount IF a certain number of products are sold together. People with low(er) incomes or people that live individually and may not be able to consume an item in time are disadvantaged. But there are some workarounds, like teaming up with a friend or friends to purchase or (I guess) buying in bulk and then processing a return (tedious). Saving at the margins on certain items when you purchase more than one is something people seem to be familiar with and unbothered by. 

The other side is more egregious: it’s when buying in bulk is literally more expensive than if you purchased the same item individually multiple times and just added it up. 

It seems that on social media, people are picking up on deceptive architecture on price labelling that trumpets an all-in price for buying 2 or 3 or 4 (or more) that’s actually more expensive than the advertised per-unit price of just one item.

Why would buying more inflate the price? It defies logic, unless it is intended to deter bulk purchasing (?). I can’t help but think of Harry Brignull’s excellent book (and Twitter threads) on “Deceptive Patterns: Exposing the Tricks Tech Companies Use to Control You.” His focus is digital but this seems like an example of “misdirection.” It’s like a deceitful tech tactic in a brick and mortar setting. Or nudge theory gone wrong in the grocery aisle. Deceptive architecture lures us to make decisions that go against our interests or interfere with our autonomy. The ‘nudging’ happens to us often online, and you probably don’t really notice it - not noticing is sort of the point.  

We have federal rules around false and misleading advertising through the Competition Act. I think it’s fair to assert that these bulk ‘discount’ claims that-are-actually-more-expensive - however rare - are designed to mislead. We also have rules around labelling, but they pertain to the contents (ingredients/components) and geographic origins of an item and aren’t related to the signalling we see on a shelf. Some have called for the practice of unit pricing to be mandatory (in Canada, it’s only legislated in Quebec).That seems like an easy win for the province. 

So the question is: Is it misleading to make the bulk price of food higher, knowing the consumer presumes that buying more introduces some savings? It’s not like the lowest price is actually the law or anything (#Zellers). This is an example of a practice that is sporadic and difficult to detect, but totally sucks. 

The federal government has recently tripled consumer advocacy funding to support research and consumer awareness as part of the plan to tackle food inflation in Canada. The goal is to allow the government to expand the scope of existing consumer projects to increase the scope of consumer projects to increase research in the retail sector, including groceries. 

This seems like a great research project on a practice that is harmful to consumers. But why not also crowdsource from the eagle-eyed consumers that are already taking the time to read the fine print here? It wouldn’t be that hard to pay attention to what people are already calling out.  

I also want to (try to) V-assume the very best intentions here - that it’s just the result of rushing or genuinely poor arithmetic. If it’s not, what we are seeing is a deceptive pricing practice designed to nudge people to buy more, and pay more as a result. You also have to wonder if the grocery store(s) can feign innocence here: after all, they aren’t explicitly saying that the larger font is the better deal. Is this so they can tell the Minister that they have lower (per unit) prices, while pushing people towards volume buying that instantly negates that discount? That's my little conspiracy theory. 

😡 Sometimes, it’s the little things that can unlock your inner incredible Hulk (in this case, incredible bulk?). 

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UPDATE: A regs reader let me know that this is called ‘double ticketing,’ when you charge someone the higher of two prices and it is CRIMINAL.

BTW, I am lurching back to ‘real’ life this month. Maybe we can hang?

• November 13th (7.00 pm) - I’ll be interviewing Naomi Alderman about her new book The Future at the Toronto Reference Library. Join us!

• November 16th (7.00 pm) - I’ll be in Stratford with Cory Doctorow as part of the Provocation Ideas Festival. We’ll be in conversation with Nahlah Ayed of CBC IDEAS and you can register here. 💡

• November 22nd (7.00 pm) - I’ll interview Cory at the Toronto Reference Library (also 7.00 pm). I can’t share a registration link just yet because of the TPL cybersecurity incident. 😬

• November 27th (6:00 pm) - I’m facilitating an optional activity ahead of Frances Haugen’s lecture at the Toronto Reference Library. Hint: it’s all about platform governance. 🦩

• November 28th - Hosting the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, celebrating good ideas and great people. 📖

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While the world watches the FTC’s historic cases against Google (accusing the firm of using illegal agreements to maintain a monopoly) and Amazon (accusing the firm of abusing its monopoly and harming competition for independent sellers and consumers) unfold, our primary competition issues remain decidedly provincial in both senses of the word. 

The Counterbalance

Google, Amazon, and Booking: anti-monopoly gathers pace

Welcome to The Counterbalance, the newsletter of the Balanced Economy Project. This edition focuses on three signficant new episodes: one in Europe, barely noticed, and two big, meaty (and widely publicised) moves in the U.S. There’s more good news from the growing anti-monopoly network too, an important new book on Big Pharma, a landscape analysis of …

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Balanced Economy Project

At Canada’s recent annual Competition Summit, the corporate law establishment spent a significant portion of the day ruminating on the country’s competition bugaboos: supply management and inter-provincial trade restrictions that limit our ability to buy, sell, and transport goods and services (like the ones restricting cross-border purchasing of alcohol or meat, or redundant employment certifications). And don’t worry, participants raised concerns about the lack of foreign competition in certain regulated sectors as well. 

There was a tacit implication that if we can’t resolve these local and long-standing BINGO-card barriers within our borders, we won’t be able to look outside of them and properly acknowledge new digital business behaviours that control online marketplaces.  

Harmonising interprovincial trade restrictions is a dusty idea that is finally getting more momentum. What can I say? We’re swiffering. A book on interprovincial free trade recently won the Donner Prize, and is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Balsillie Prize for Public Policy - which is a sign that it’s caught the attention of wonks who may hope that it helps to Trojan horse a thorny topic back in the public consciousness.

The endurance of these barriers is difficult to rationalise and dorky to defend. Maybe we will finally be able to reduce some of those arbitrary hurdles as part of an all-of-government approach to competition. Which is to say that there is a role for the state to make these markets more free and fair. It’s a misapprehension that more competitive markets are necessarily the result of ‘less’ or ‘no’ regulation.  

Which brings me to supply management. It’s challenging to appreciate how unleashing the power of poultry to an un-managed marketplace will make a meaningful dent in Canada’s productivity. But that doesn’t mean that the system isn’t worth revisiting and refreshing, especially with the government’s new focus on the grocery sector, which means that decision-makers are looking under regulatory cushions for cost savings at the check out. 

At worst, Canada’s competition establishment pointing to these twin perennial problems is a convenient way to distract from other client interests they could be protecting, namely those of the largest technology companies.

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Amazon uses a series of well-documented tactics to constrain access to their digital marketplace, extracting steep tolls from businesses selling online.  The mistake would be thinking that Canada needs to end supply management before it can address systemic barriers in e-commerce. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) included some feedback from members about their experiences with Amazon in their competition submission:   

• Almost half of the members surveyed agreed they were finding it harder to compete with the rise of digital competitors like Amazon;

• Almost 90 per cent of members survey agreed that the dominance of big businesses selling online (such as Amazon) threatens Canadian small businesses; 

• 55% of CFIB members surveyed were dissatisfied with the eCommerce platform due to unfair and questionable practices imposed on them by Amazon; 

• Key issues raised: Amazon encourages consumers to purchase their own products over those offered by small businesses, Amazon gets suppliers to prohibit small businesses from selling certain products, Amazon places small business listings lower in the search results, Amazon restricts the ability of small businesses to communicate with their customers, Amazon imposes various arbitrary fees that sellers must pay to continue accessing the platform.

Our attention is evolving and we may be more willing to confront these inherited pricing systems instead of defending them. It all comes down to a question of courage. Maybe we have mismanaged legacy marketplaces with interventions that no longer serve Canadians well and unduly constrain competition. Internal trade barriers can be unhelpful in a global economy, and it’s weird how we regulate whether alcohol can be sold in a different province, when certain trucks can drive, and the types of toilet seats that can be used on construction sites. But we are wrong to insist that these interventions must be sequenced. If you don’t like supply management frameworks, you are going to hate arbitrary algorithmic manipulation.  

BIG by Matt Stoller

The Price-Fixing Economy

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. Today, the government came out with a ‘blowout’ report showing massive growth in the number of jobs in the economy. Among normal people, polling on the economy is still abysmal, even though the numbers suggest they sh…

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3 years ago · 284 likes · 50 comments · Matt Stoller

Of course the two systems have important distinctions. One has publicly-determined and clearly communicated rules (in the case of supply management, each commodity is governed by its own elected provincial marketing board according to provincial legislation and regulations) and the other is a product of an unaccountable de facto private regulator. But it seems to me that the core behaviours that people are revolting against are pretty similar. The motivating idea seems to be that markets should have less friction, whether that’s imposed by the state or a firm. I’m on board with that.  

A firm like Amazon ‘supply manages’ information, pricing, and labour, harming independent businesses in the process. The platform also penalises sellers that offer lower prices on other sites. The company computationally throttles the search results and pricing on Marketplace in its favour, but their rules aren’t transparent or democratic and they are only accountable to shareholders. Better competition legislation and enforcement can help to level that playing field and actually open up Canada.

We’re calling for more ‘free’ trade but maybe a better frame is ‘transparent’ trade. Many marketplaces are still too murky. When it comes to inter-provincial trade barriers, we can identify them but can’t always appreciate their historic rationale - many feel like barnacles. Digital marketplaces tread the line between efficient and exploitative. Think of Amazon and Walmart using AI to extract concessions from suppliers. I guess I am trying to say that there are so many parallels here. Like, my man - you don’t like that certain goods can’t be easily ported across some provinces? Then let’s get going on open banking so consumers can move their financial data and kickstart innovations, you know?

The real reason I started tapping this bad boy out is because I think we should stop pretending that we can’t face digital competition realities head on until we revolutionise how we sell milk and cheese. Competition modernization can’t be a game of chicken. 🐔

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When it comes to shopping around [in Canada, but maybe everywhere?], people either feel stuck, screwed over, or a little bit of both. 

To that end, three fairly recent (and fatalistic!) pieces that try to explain Canada’s lethargic economy have been rattling around in my mind:

• Canadians work almost as much as Americans, yet produce far less - diagnosis: Canadian businesses invest less in research and development, new equipment, and new technologies, and our marketplace is less competitive as a result. 

• Why isn’t Canada an economic giant? - diagnosis: poor labour productivity is at the heart of the country’s growth challenges, Canadian industry may not be ‘strong enough’ to compete globally.

• The monopoly in Canada’s blood: how we learned to stop worrying and love big business. diagnosis: “the belief that forming dominant organisations is inherently virtuous….We’ve long latched on to a truism that competition doesn’t always make sense in every industry.

The answer to drowsy marketplaces and sluggish productivity has been the battle cry of ‘more competition.’ But somehow just adding a couple of competitors won’t do enough to address a deeper underlying issue: a growing mistrust of marketplaces. 

Canadians have been asking good questions about ‘greedflation,’ after feeling suspicious that certain companies may be profiteering in the pandemic. While some scoff at this inkling, it’s tricky to ask people to reconcile headlines about record profit during a period of substantial price growth. Researchers have been investigating whether and when industry can pass on the full cost of inflation and/or payment processing to customers. Such tactics are not purely the result of limited choice in a marketplace (though price following becomes much easier when there are only a few players in an industry). They also require a tacit complicity from those that benefit. Sort of sad, right? 

Well before this inflationary period, Canadians have long been lamenting the confines of our grocery, telecommunications, airline and banking sectors (and others) - we’ve just been developing more literacy about it lately. Even so, there’s a sort of learned helplessness or reluctant resignation that comes with being a Canadian consumer right now. News is being blocked by a tech platform that doesn’t want to comply with legislation (Meta) and Amazon secretly threatened to turn off the marketplace if the country moved forward with competition reform. I’m not sure how else to say it, really: we’re getting pushed around a lot of the time. 

*This* is why the terms of competition and how we enforce our law(s) and design complementary ones matters so much. 

When Cineplex restricts access to film and prevents independent cinema from screening the movies of their choice, when Ticketmaster profits off of pretend fees, when film and television shows are not obligated to disclose product placement(s) in the same way that online influencers do - consumers suffer. Same deal when companies either ‘shrinkflate’ or suggest customers use more of a certain product so they they have to replace it faster, as recently discussed in a Globe and Mail article about Gatorade. I haterade it (but loved the article). 

When companies make outlandish claims about the environmental-friendliness of their products, they are *sometimes* caught greenwashing. But even then: seriously? Lying about your product is so lame. Why do companies even try? It may be that in consolidated sectors, they just don’t need to court or maintain our trust anymore because they aren’t actually competing for it. 

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There’s a bunch of other profit-maximising schemes that are difficult for us to even detect in the first place, like self-preferencing, personalised pricing  or convincing synthetic media that isn’t labelled as being digitally generated. I mean, for goodness sakes, we were measuring the absorbance of period products with salt water instead of blood. Tic Tacs are 94% sugar and claim to be sugar free. Sometimes stuff just doesn’t make a ton of sense to shoppers, like the exact same product being priced differently at different stores that are owned by the same firm. Is there any way to get legitimate pricing predictability when you are lassoed by little loopholes? You can barely even think about buying stuff online now, as you get taunted at digital checkouts by deceptive architecture designed to prompt our purchase like countdown timers and fake low inventory claims (for more, read the new book ‘Deceptive Patterns’ from Harry Brignull). 

Another catalyst for the loss of trust is the often falsified ‘happy talk’ of the review economy. Initially, this was something that was hyper-democratic ('wisdom of crowds'): honest thoughts from peers online, anonymous or not. Probably best popularised through Yelp and later Google, Amazon, and other e-commerce sites like those powered by Shopify or Etsy, etc (*where a few bad reviews can legitimately hurt a seller). Similar situation for sites like Goodreads, Airbnb, and others. There's a sort of meaningless positivity everywhere that is now exploited by bots and basically polarised (5 stars or bust). These systems - despite their well-acknowledged deficiencies - are used against workers as well (algorithmic management of UBER drivers, DoorDash, etc). Fake reviews fall under deceptive marketing guidelines of the Competition Act, but the Bureau's 2022 campaign on it was all about 'educating' consumers to "recognize, reject, and report fake reviews." So the onus is downloaded to individuals to somehow guard against this while in the US,  the FTC has cracked down (proposing a ban on fake reviews, fines), and some platforms (Yelp, Amazon) have designed automated software to combat them. 

I also think of this recent 'reveal' that a PR firm has been manipulating the Rotten Tomato scores of movies for at least five years by paying some "critics" directly. And of 'review bombing,' where a website gets flooded with negative reviews as a way to discredit or discipline a competitor. 

So how did a mechanism designed to be so wonderfully democratic become as exploited as it is persistent? What are the alternative sources of authority on a product's quality or a seller's reliability, etc.? Should we still try to trust strangers over some sort of independent arbiter? Or is it time to stamp out stars because they have become meaningless?

⭐ Markets need a north star, not five of them. 

I think all of these ploys (and more) in aggregate lead to an intense mistrust of marketplaces - which makes sense, because marketplaces generally are increasingly deceptive and exploitative. It’s a raw deal. 

Why is this happening? Is it [just] because legislators are doing a bad job of mediating and policing marketplaces? Some take this stance, arguing that the existing laws on the books are more than sufficient, but they are merely under-enforced. In this scenario, the government is the goon making it suck to shop. I don’t agree that the state is the sole source of our competition woes. It’s also difficult to blame the government for not evolving competition law quickly enough while convincing people that modern legislation will suddenly shift marketplaces, too. 

I brought up these muddled feelings on a video call with my friend and sometime (but not enough!) collaborator Denise Hearn. She agreed that there is a widespread loss of trust not just in large firms or markets, but in the government’s ability to functionally regulate. While it’s harder to solve this larger problem of trust in institutions generally, it does need to be acknowledged as reformers propose more, or better, or better enforced regulatory layers. 

She also distinguished between companies, operating in markets and sometimes setting the terms of those markets, and the larger philosophical frame that “free” markets solve most problems. When it comes to problem definition, it’s probably not just a handful of dominant firms that are causing so much frustration and embarrassment in Canada (*though this is significantly easier to meme). 

It’s that markets need to be tended, like a garden, to function fairly and well. Markets always involve moral and political choices, and she recommended reading “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.” (She summarised the book on her blog last year). A large part of why Canadian marketplaces aren’t producing the outcomes we hope for and theorise is because we have abdicated our political and moral responsibility for tending them, and instead allow de facto private regulators - firms that moderate (or regulate) markets in their favour – do it for us. 

So why do we (*all of us, not just Denise and me) keep putting up with all this? The snowball keeps rolling because we have a messy mix of: bad legislation, no legislation, or poorly enforced legislation. That’s dangerous because it erodes the credibility of the state to step in and mediate. We need smart policy that evolves appropriately and is enforced vigorously. In its absence, we are continually being outfoxed by savvy firms, like when Zoom attempted to force customers to allow the company to train and test the company’s AI models using their content OR when Google updated its privacy policy so it could scrape the open web for data to improve its AI models. It feels like companies feel entitled to take a lot from us and trick us into buying products that may not even (ever?) live up to the claims made to advertise them. 

A *lot* of work has to be done to restore consumer trust in marketplaces and just make them more fair and transparent. 

Here’s my actual point: what I observe is that the ongoing erosion between firm and purchaser is less about a false choice between ‘free’ or moderated markets and much more about the compounding scepticism towards both firms and regulators that comes from the relentless burden of manipulative markets that have been created and are moderated by private actors. Politicians are likely to stay anchored on the drumbeat of affordability OR the allure of something called ‘freedom.’ But who will champion something as simple as markets that don’t f*ck you over, just because they can?

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