Kenny Jacoby

In some cases, it takes over the youth hockey programs entirely.

And once that happens, in addition to pricing going up,

The family sort of gets sucked into Black Bear's ecosystem where you're not only playing for a team that is owned by Black Bear, but you're playing in a league that is owned by Black Bear.

Teams in those leagues are steered into Black Bear's tournaments.

If you play in those tournaments, you're forced to buy hotel rooms that you don't necessarily want for the duration of those tournaments.

And if you don't want to travel for whatever reason, if you can't,

If you want to watch your kids play remotely, you have to pay even more to stream those games through a service called Black Bear TV.

So essentially, Black Bear owns multiple layers of the supply chain and different markets that are critical to the sports infrastructure.

So if you're in one of those markets, there's almost no escaping the fact that you're going to have to be paying Black Bear additional fees.

Yeah, I spoke to multiple antitrust experts about this.

And the fact that BlackBerry is buying up ice rinks isn't so much the problem.

It's the fact that they sort of use their control of the ice as leverage to get an advantage in other markets.

And that's the sort of thing that antitrust laws are supposed to prevent.

So if BlackBerry didn't own the ice, it would have a really hard time

starting up its own teams and leagues and tournaments and that sort of thing.

But because it owns the ice, it can sort of be the gatekeeper of who uses it and then use that to kind of take control of other aspects of the sport.

There is sort of a misconception that antitrust law is just about market share.

And if you viewed it from that lens, you know, BlackBerry

They're not exactly McDonald's or Walmart, right?

They don't own a huge percentage of the total rinks in the country.