New Rules for the Game Rebooting Canada’s competition regime for the digital economy BY MICHAEL CRAWFORD URBAN

But because much of our analysis deals less with enforcement and the law as it currently stands, and more with questions of policy and changes that ought to be made to a variety of laws and regulations, the range of our analysis and recommendations will be appreciably wider and will touch on a much broader spectrum of issues and institutions. [...] Additional recommendations touch on steps Canada can take to begin crafting a response to the emergence of AI, potential amendments to the Competition Act and upgrades to the Government of Canada’s technical capacity and technological expertise. [...] Indeed, the term “innovation” appears only twice in the text of Canada’s Competition Act and in neither case is its encouragement identified as a purpose of the act.23 Unfortunately, this imparts a fairly static view of the market and the benefits of competition to the act. [...] But, given the oligopolistic/oligopsonistic position of many of the platform firms – and the unequal balance in bargaining power between platforms and users that this creates – and the barriers to entry 53 A monopsony or oligopsony is similar to a monopoly or oligopoly except with the firm being the dominant purchaser instead of the dominant seller. [...] But to understand why this development is concerning at a more general level, it is important to remember that the purpose of modeling individuals’ behaviour is to enable firms to individualize their prices so as to maximize both the number of profitable sales made and the level of profit they are able to extract from each of these sales.