The Ontario government says it’s going to take on ticket scalping. Good luck with that. Here are some very, very hard truths about the situation.

Toronto Blue Jays fans hoping for a ticket to a home game in the World Series against Los Angeles are mad. They did everything right, lining up online at Ticketmaster ready to buy. But within seconds, all the available tickets were gone. And nanoseconds after that, those tickets for sale by secondary sellers. I saw prices as high as $10,000, although I’ve heard of far higher prices.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford blames Ticketmaster. “My personal opinion … they’re gouging the people. When you have one player in the market that controls the tickets, that’s not right for the people.”

Oh, dear. How simplistic. Let’s go through the relevant points again.

• Ontario had an anti-scalping law that was brought in by the previous Liberal government. The plan was to put a 50% cap on any resale, which is very similar to what the UK is considering right now.
• Those measures were canceled by Ford’s Conservatives in 2019 because they were “unenforceable” (more on that anon.) Now Ford says that he’s looking at new legislation.
• Many of the tickets up for resale are not only from big players like StubHub, but also from hundreds (maybe thousands) of small and individual sellers. When you have a season ticket, you get first dibs on playoff tickets. How many season ticket holders see a chance to make some big money by flipping their tickets? Hint: A lot.
• Without price controls, supply-and-demand forces take over. There are only 50,000-ish seats available per game and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people want them. What happens when demand exceeds supply? The price of the commodity goes up.
• And how do you enforce a law when so many of the resellers are based outside local jurisdiction? Many scalpers and bot networks are headquartered overseas in places beyond the law. Thanks, internet.

Now let’s look at Ticketmaster.

• Ticketmaster does not set the face value of a ticket. That’s up to the entity for whom Ticketmaster is acting as a sales agent.
• Ticketmaster does have something called TradeDesk, which is a special service for reliable bulk buyers of tickets. These buyers get privileged access. That means they can buy tickets fast and flip them quickly.
• Ticketmaster is facing a lot of heat in the US over TradeDesk. Earlier this week, Ticketmaster wrote a letter to Congress saying that they’re permanently shutting down TradeDesk.
• More measures will be put in place to ensure that the general public has a better shot at tickets. For example, Ticketmaster says that each buyer will be limited to just one Ticketmaster account and that account will be tied to the buyer’s social insurance number. That should hurt mass buyers who have traditionally gotten around ticket limits by having dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Ticketmaster accounts which mimic individual humans but work at speeds far, far faster.
• Ticketmaster also offers its “Verified Resale” program, which enables individuals who have purchased tickets to sell them through Ticketmaster’s secure portal. There are all kinds of problems with this, not least of which is that Ticketmaster collects a second service fee on sales. In fact, there’s a second discussion to be had on Ticketmaster’s entire fee structure, but that’s for another time. (Note, though, that collecting service fees is the only way Ticketmaster covers its costs and makes money. No fees, no infrastructure, no tickets. There are, however, several cases before the courts involving fees.)
• Ticketmaster is legitimately the greatest blocker of ticket-buying bots in the universe. It claims to block 99% of them, but when that 1% gets through…

Other points:

• Secondary sellers like StubHub are against any kind of controls, of course, because putting markups on tickets is how they make money. They claim that price controls and other measures constitute artificial controls on the marketplace. If that happens, a whole new unregulated black market for tickets will open up.
• Modern ticket scalping has been around for at least 175 years. Over nearly two centuries, no one has figured out a way to stop it. It’s a constant game of Whack-A-Mole. For a deep dive into this, see my Uncharted podcast, Ticket Scalper Crimes.
• And don’t tell me we should go back to lining up for tickets at the box office. Scalpers simply pay people to stand in line. They buy the maximum number of tickets, which they then turn over to the scalpers.

Scapling sucks. Not being given a fair shake at buying a ticket sucks. Seeing people jump the queue because of special privileges sucks. But Ford is all bluster on this. By all means, try to curb the situation and make things more fair, but if history is a reliable indication, nothing will work.

Welcome to supply-and-demand capitalism.