Canada Competition Bureau sues Google for anti-competitive conduct in online ads
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canada.ca
The Bank of Canada even said that one of the largest contributers to Canada's low productivity is the lack of competition present in so many of our industries.
Protectionism under the guise of regulation, similar to the EU.
On the other hand, inflated ad prices and deflated online revenue do hurt Canadian businesses selling online. I don’t read this action as pro-Canadian search but anti-abusing monopolization
As all governments, the liberals are imperfect. However, The House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance (FINA) spent several years grilling banks, and some change has happened.
One example?
Prior to now you could escalate issues to first a bank ombudsman, then a provincal one. Such complaints where handled by an "independent" body, which of course the banks sneakily bought controlling interest in.
New legislation now prevents this, with the government instead vetting companies which will then act as an ombudsman.
A response of the perpetually cranky and disillusioned is "oh sure, but..." with a variety of concocted reasons as to why it's all hopeless and corrupt.
Thing is, change in a democratic government takes time, because in a democracy you cannot issue edicts on many things. Oh I know, upcoming sourpuss response, but but but! This guy did that and that guy did that, so edicts happen that's not the point and a whataboutism and exceeding rare that's why it's news.
What the point is, change does happen, and yes for the better (I can hear the disillusioned starting to type already), and we do infact fix things in Canada.
We do have a different market than the US. This is of course a good thing.
We also have the second largest country on the planet, yet with only the population of California. We also have a neighbour to the south who, while good folks, would literally control every aspect of our country via economic means without some balances in place.
This isn't malign, just how it works when an economy 20x your size, with megacorps that can buy companies which are behemoths in Canada, as an afterthought.
So again, things are and must be different unless we intend to allow another country to control how we do business with one another, communicate, interact and so on.
I'm sure some will want to respond here with loads of "who cares", and that's fine. Such folk can live in a world of simple solutions, disregarding consequences, but that's folly.
When we vote at the ballot box and you vote for a red tie and I vote for a blue tie, one of us gets the tie we want and the other is forced to wear the wrong tie.
When we vote with our wallets I can get a green tie and you can get a yellow tie and someone else can have a purple tie. Everyone gets the tie they want, as long as there’s enough competition in the tie business.
The original point of my complaint was not that I want a better regulator. I want competition so that I can get what I want, at a lower price, and I’m not beholden to the ballot box.
If foreign corporations control all aspects of your economy, you become a puppet.
Which by the way seems like a crazy program they got going on up there. It seems like the companies there are using them as scabs for non-unionized jobs.
Yes, we need 'better government and regulations', not just 'more regulations'. It's literally the current government's regulation changes which allowed the insane levels of immigration, TFWs, students, etc.
> Which by the way seems like a crazy program they got going on up there. It seems like the companies there are using them as scabs for non-unionized jobs.
Yup, it's textbook wage suppression.
For context, my family and I just returned from a lap around Lake Huron. I invite you and yours to take a similar trip in the US, just to see the differences. Earlier in the year, my family and I went to Wyoming. Once we got off the freeways, we saw what I call The Real America.
What does it look like? It looks like a place that has been repeatedly punched in the face by big corporations for 50 years. The two trips showed quite the contrast: Middle Ontario, while rural, looked quite hopeful in comparison.
Here to your South, simple solutions won again. Mostly because the losing party did not make The Vast Middle feel like their problems were seen and heard.
Except our GDP per capita is somewhere around Louisiana. I think what you are seeing in Middle Ontario is boiled by insane, unsustainable debt levels.
Same goes for phone bills which are going down across Canada. We are still paying too much but it's much better than ~4-5 years ago by a big margin.
And for anyone who wants to looks at the fundamentals, all large telecom companies (Bell, Telus, Rogers) in Canada have lost >20% of their valuation over the last 2 years. Pretty sure that if they "owned" the government they would have found a way to buoy themselves.
They are buoying themselves. If we had proper competition all 3 would be bankrupt by now.
https://www.thestar.com/business/rogers-bell-and-telus-colle...
Isn’t the right answer that regulation should rein in what companies do regardless of citizenship of the ownership of the company? And by increasing competition we would eliminate the possibility of American behemoths from simply buying everything (trading the problem we have now for the same problem with different owners). We need more competition American or otherwise.
> What the point is, change does happen, and yes for the better (I can hear the disillusioned starting to type already), and we do infact fix things in Canada.
According to most Canadians things are changing for the worse, and that's pretty obvious when you look at housing, healthcare, groceries, general affordability, etc.
> We do have a different market than the US. This is of course a good thing.
We have a far less competitive market, we have much lower wages for the same jobs, higher taxes, higher cost of living.
> We also have the second largest country on the planet, yet with only the population of California.
What does that have to do with anything? We have the richest country on the planet in terms of resources, I don't see how having more land and resources is some kind of excuse for poor performance.
> I'm sure some will want to respond here with loads of "who cares", and that's fine.
We have the worst housing market in history, we have falling per-capita GDP due to completely irresponsible levels of immigration, which is also overflowing our healthcare and justice systems. We have record youth unemployment, record homelessness and food bank usage. We have a nonstop stream of corruption scandals in the federal government. Tell me again how the government is good but good things just take time lmao.
I didnt claim otherwise. I asked a poster what area they thought Rogers had a monopoly in. Telco sector has gotten quite a bit better in the last few years, but there are certainly still improvements needed.
Here's a CRTC article on how they're improving competition (regulation requiring the big companies to provide wholesale access to their networks) https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/phone/mobile/indus.htm
Here's a government press release from earlier in 2024 noting an 18% decrease over a one year period https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
And if you want an anecdote, for about a decade I used to have to pay $60 monthly minimum to get any useful amount of data. Over the last 2-3 years, that dropped to 55, 50, 45, and now I pay $34/month for 20gb of data with free roaming in the US. The government's statistics seem borne out by my experience.