Weekly Roundup: Norwegians Nail Big Tech and Loblaw Gets Busted on Privacy
Plus: $7 is the new $5 when it comes to telco price hikes and details emerge of an industry held hostage in the Live Nation antitrust trial
What if someone were to cut the toes off your socks or sawed just a tiny bit off the legs of your tables to make them wobbly? That’s the premise behind the new “Make it Shitty” video from the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) that went viral this week. The hilarious four-minute spot follows a professional “enshittifier” who works diligently to make life worse for people by committing little acts of sabotage, like shaking up pop bottles or taking chains off bike sprockets. Our protagonist then discovers the internet and that it allows him to ply his trade at scale, and boy does that make him happy:
It’s of course a parable for Big Tech that borrows heavily from Canadian activist-author (and Do Not Pass Go podcast guest) Cory Doctorow, whose 2025 book Enshittification outlines how companies such as Google, Amazon and Meta have locked users into steadily worsening services while simultaneously killing off competition.
The video is also tied to a new campaign by the NCC for stronger competition enforcement and digital protections. The advocacy group’s “Break Free” report outlines how these companies have amassed their power and suggests ways to reverse it, including better rights for consumers to modify their devices and services, stronger interoperability and online decentralization, more vigorous enforcement of competition laws, measures to encourage development of alternative providers, and reducing public sector dependence on Big Tech. To go with the report, the NCC and other civil groups across Europe and the United States have sent letters to the European Commission and U.S. Congress urging action to restore competition and protect consumers.
“Consumers are being boiled alive and, because it’s happening gradually, we don’t notice,” Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, director of digital policy at the NCC, tells Do Not Pass Go. “This report and video is borne out of the frustration that we’ve felt for so many years and the realization that the current remedies we have are not sufficient.”
The Consumers Council of Canada confirms they have discussed the report with the NCC. “The underlying premise of purposefully dis-improved technology and everything being subject to a subscription model is a core 21st century problem, along with all the legacy consumer issues that exist,” says Neil Hartung, a lawyer with the organization.
Doctorow, for his part, also gets a kick out of the Norwegian group’s take. “It’s an honour to have my work cited in this wonderful video,” he tells Do Not Pass Go. “This is a fantastic example of what truly great consumer advocacy can be.”
🥊 COMPETITION
Former Competition Commissioner (and first ever Do Not Pass Go podcast guest) MATTHEW BOSWELL has landed a new job. The Globe and Mail reports that Boswell, who led the Competition Bureau for seven years, is now a partner at the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm’s antitrust practice. Boswell is going to help clients understand the recent changes to competition laws, some of which he advocated for and helped usher in during his tenure.
The federal government this week announced that it is keeping the merger review threshold for the COMPETITION BUREAU unchanged in 2026, at $93 million. The enforcement agency thus won’t be required to look at deals where the acquiree has less than $93 million in assets or revenue or where the combined entity has assets or revenue less than $400 million, although it still can if it really wants to. Keldon Bester, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, says keeping the threshold steady is a good thing: “The government was wise to keep the merger notification threshold flat, and it should continue to do so. Increasing the threshold in line with inflation [would] mean more transactions slipping under the radar when we need to be tightening our approach to mergers. We need more information about mergers and acquisitions in our economy, not less.”
📱 TELECOM
It looks like BELL and TELUS have called a truce in their battle over wholesale access to each others’ fibre networks, which they are using to provide internet services to customers in their respective territories. Telus was the first to gripe to the CRTC about Bell being obstructive about providing access on its turf in Ontario and Quebec, with Bell then making the same complaints about Telus when it came to western Canada. The companies have made peace and withdrawn their CRTC complaints, though no details of their agreement or how they came to it are known.
Speaking of TELUS, the company says it is aiming to have a partner in place for its Telus Health division by the summer, just in time for new chief executive Victor Dodig (the former CEO of CIBC) to take over from outgoing boss Darren Entwistle. Telus says it wants to maintain majority ownership of the Health business for the foreseeable future, but is open to selling a minority stake or eventually floating it through an initial public offering. And on the topic of telcos making forays outside their core competencies, ROGERS is now the first issuer of the World Legend Mastercard, a new premium tier of the credit card that offers above-average cash-back returns for the company’s customers. The $495-a-year card, through Rogers Bank (yes, that exists), comes with a host of perks for high-end spenders, including free roaming, travel insurance and streaming credits.
Meanwhile, telco price hikes are coming in hot and heavy. TELUS’s Koodo brand is jacking up prices by $7 while its Public Mobile “discount” division is also raising prices by $2 to $4 per month. Not wanting to be left out, ROGERS is raising internet and TV prices by $7 per month. Not only are the telcos back to regular price hikes, it very much looks like $7 is the new $5.
🕺 ENTERTAINMENT
The LIVE NATION antitrust trial began this week in New York and, as expected, the company’s dirty laundry has started to come out. Among the gems to already emerge include the former chief executive of the Barclays Center revealing that the company yanked tours from the Brooklyn arena because it had opted to use a different ticket provider, as well as competitor SeatGeek offering venues “Live Nation retaliation insurance” if they switched away from Ticketmaster. Department of Justice attorney David Dahlquit told jurors that, “the concert industry itself is broken.” David Marriott, the defendant’s lawyer, countered with, “Live Nation and Ticketmaster are all about bringing joy to people’s lives.”
The woes of U.S. luxury cinema chain iPIC THEATRES may not seem super relevant to Canadians but it could be a foreshadowing of larger things to come for the movie-exhibition industry, as our next news item illustrates. The iPic chain, which touts luxury seating and and in-seat dining experience that sounds a lot like the VIP tier at CINEPLEX theatres, hasn’t been able to recover from the Covid shutdown and is now pursuing a sale through Chapter 11 bankrupting protection.
That news perhaps adds intrigue to this week’s Do Not Pass Go podcast episode, in which arts journalist and theatre historian Eric Veillette opines on the future of large chains including CINEPLEX. Veillette sees chains shrinking and growing relevance for independent cinemas, many of which are currently booming:
🛒 RETAIL & GROCERY
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner revealed this week that LOBLAW had been violating information retention principles found under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) with its PC Optimum loyalty program. The regulator found that Loblaw, Canada’s largest grocery chain, was taking an unreasonable amount of time to address account deletion requests, that it did not respond to certain privacy-related inquiries and that it was retaining customers’ information longer than needed. Commissioner Philippe Dufresne said in a release that the company has agreed to respond to faster to deletion requests and to implement better anonymization processes, but no penalty was announced. The regulator doesn’t have the power to penalize violators, but would very much like to be able to do so. “The OPC has long called for privacy law reform to modernize Canada's federal private-sector privacy law, to give the Commissioner the ability to make orders and impose penalties,” a spokesperson says.
🏦 BANKS
Remember when everybody got excited by the federal budget last fall promising to finally introduce OPEN BANKING this year? Yeah, well, not so fast, according to Ron Morrow, the Bank of Canada’s executive director of payments, supervision and oversight. At the Open Banking Expo in Toronto this week, Morrow said it’s going to be extremely difficult to pull off this year thanks to the to-do list before him. The central bank is still in its information-gathering stage, which could take months.
💾 BIG TECH
In case you missed it, GOOGLE suffered a big loss this week at the Competition Tribunal, which ruled that the Competition Bureau’s abuse-of-dominance challenge against the company in the online advertising market can move ahead. Google had argued that the potential financial penalty in the civil proceeding could exceed $90 billion, which would qualify it for criminal protections under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Tribunal didn’t agree. Read more here:
🚨 COMING UP
Whenever there’s a new story about Canada’s airlines doing something bad, there’s almost always a quote or two in there from one industry critic: GABOR LUKACS. For nearly 20 years, this one-man air force (and math prodigy) has been taking the likes of Air Canada and WestJet to court on behalf of passengers – and winning. He joins Do Not Pass Go this Monday to talk about what drives him and what needs to change to fix Canada’s worsening airline problem.