StubHub has been fined $20,000 by the province of Ontario for breaking a law that holds the resale of a live event ticket to the price printed on it. Exclaim reports that Ontario's Consumer Beware list records the penalty as two separate $10,000 counts: one for allegedly listing a ticket above face value, and one for allegedly putting a sale through without holding proof of what the ticket first cost.
The fine falls under Bill 97, which the Ontario government passed in April. Among a set of changes that had nothing to do with concerts, including a rewrite of the province's freedom of information rules, the bill banned reselling tickets to live events for more than their face value. StubHub is the second marketplace penalised under that clause inside a few weeks. SeatGeek was fined $25,000 earlier in September.
Both companies have made the same defence, and it is a technical objection rather than a moral one. Resale platforms say the primary seller never hands them the original price of a ticket, which leaves them unable to tell a listing at face value from a listing at four times it. Without that number, the province is asking them to police a line they cannot actually see.
Their second argument is about who gains. StubHub and SeatGeek have both said that capping resale in Ontario pushes buyers back towards the primary market, and the primary market in North America is dominated by a single company. The pattern is familiar from elsewhere: StubHub has spent heavily fighting a comparable cap in the United States, and a California bill to do the same thing died in a Senate committee before it ever reached a vote.
That objection sits awkwardly beside the antitrust record Exclaim points to. A jury found earlier this year that Live Nation had illegally monopolised the ticket market, and the company then settled with the US Department of Justice without being forced to separate from Ticketmaster. Its lobbying has been busy on both sides of the border, and the company hired the US president's personal lawyer while the federal case was live.
What two fines do not yet show is whether the cap changes anything. Twenty thousand dollars is small against what a marketplace takes from a single arena run, and Ontario has so far issued penalties rather than pulled anyone's registration. Research published the same week found American buyers hitting inflated resale prices more often than fans in Britain or Australia, which is the behaviour Bill 97 was written to stop on this side of the line.
The facts
- Ontario has fined StubHub $20,000 under its face-value ticket resale cap.
- The penalty is recorded as two $10,000 counts on the Consumer Beware list.
- One count covers a listing above face value, the other a sale with no proof of the original price.
- SeatGeek was fined $25,000 under the same law earlier in September.
- Bill 97 passed in April and banned resale above face value in Ontario.
- StubHub and SeatGeek say resale platforms cannot see a ticket's original price.
- Both argue the cap strengthens Live Nation by removing resale competition.
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