On Monday 11 July 2016 Thomson Reuters Corp. announced it had agreed to sell its intellectual property and science business (including Web of Science) to private-equity funds affiliated with Onex Corp. and Baring Private Equity Asia for $3.55 billion in cash. This announcement appeared after the authors submitted together a proposal to the Toronto School conference trying to expand the concept of ‘monopolies of knowledge’ as coined by the Canadian economist Harold Innis. The text presented here includes an abridged version of the proposal, which is currently under review. In this text the authors have also included some further discussion of recent developments as a means to provide further context.