Ticketmaster has scored a major victory in Ottawa.
On Thursday, Canada's Competition Bureau announced that it has closed its investigation into Ticketmaster's secret scalper program, and concluded that the company's proprietary "TradeDesk" software does not break federal competition legislation.
The probe into Ticketmaster’s practices began last fall after media reports of Ticketmaster recruiting professional scalpers at a conference in Las Vegas and supplying them with software designed to help resell millions of dollars worth of tickets to concerts and sporting events.
The Competition Bureau said that enforcement of consumer protection and unfair business practice legislation is generally up to provinces. The federal government, through the office of Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, said Ottawa is urging provinces to take action against Ticketmaster. The bureau also stressed Thursday that it is continuing with a separate lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation over allegations of deceptive pricing.
However, in a news release, the Competition Bureau said that it has wrapped up its investigation into "ticket-scalper bots," which it characterizes as "software designed to purchase large amounts of tickets."
