A review by trentthompson
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Cory Doctorow, Rebecca Giblin

informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Quotes:

Capitalism is supposed to be based on free markets, but markets have a natural tendency "toward monopoly, destructive extraction, and rent-seeking," and so "require vigilant stewardship precisely to ensure they remain sufficiently marketlike."

“Excessive concentration and undue market power now look to be not an isolated issue but rather a systemic feature of America's political economy.”

When corporations have outsized influence over policy, it subverts democracy—exactly what those pre-Borkian antitrust regulators were trying to prevent by framing standards that targeted "bigness" rather than mere consumer welfare.

The Chicago School's fixation on the consumer harm standard has failed even on its own narrow terms. By putting the focus so exclusively on consumer prices, it encouraged corporations to squeeze their workers and suppliers, which reduced people's ability to pay for goods and services—exactly the same result as if consumer prices had gone up!

Adam Smith’s concern about “free markets” wasn’t freedom from governments, it was freedom from rentiers, people who derive their income merely because they own something.

Our recent ancestors practiced a lost art of maintaining a pluralistic society, where monopolies were prohibited because they were monopolies, not because they might raise prices… By focusing enforcement on "consumer harm," Borkian antitrust explicitly exempts harms to everyone else from consideration: harms to workers, suppliers, and the environment are all more or less out of scope.

While the companies that control the culture industries often paint themselves as innovative disruptors, they owe their dominance to complex webs of legal rights, corporate bullying, and regulatory capture.

Amazon tracks the phrases we highlight, the words we look up, who else is reading from the same address. All this allows it to deduce the most intimate information about our lives: whether we're struggling with our gender identity or sexual orientation, if we think our partner is cheating or that we might be depressed, if we're having money problems or struggling to get pregnant or considering leaving our jobs. Public libraries have some of this same information, and they guard it fiercely. But Amazon feeds it into an insatiable machine designed to extract maximum profit. If you, as a reader, feel uncomfortable with this, that's too bad: DRM makes it illegal for you to read or listen to the books you've purchased on surveillance-free platforms.

By nudging listeners toward playlists, Spotify is also training us to outsource our decisions about what to listen to. The more listeners automatically head to Spotify's ¡Viva Latino! or Baila Reggaeton or Rock Classics, the more streaming comes to mimic radio. The difference is that with radio there were thousands of DJs deciding what to play, including many that were passionate about breaking new local talent. With streaming, just one faceless global giant programs each channel.

Chokepoint capitalists want to chickenize (i.e. vertically integrate) everything they can, so they can control—and capture the lion's share of value from—other people's labor. Now the live music industry is being chickenized too.

Previously, running live events required artist managers, talent bookers, event promoters, venues, and ticketers, each operating largely independently from the rest. Now, though, a leviathan called Live Nation Entertainment has vertically integrated every element. It manages artists and books and promotes talent to play in venues it owns, runs, and tickets.

Artists are told that to make money from music they have to tour. If they tour, they have to do it via venues that use Ticketmaster (since it controls over 70 percent of the market), and if they use Ticketmaster it will gouge their fans and give Live Nation a competitive leg up over independent rivals.

Softbank's strategy—that is, the Saudi strategy—is to lose money for as long as it takes to establish a monopoly, and if no monopoly is forthcoming, to unload those investments through IPOs, which are bought up by naive investors who assume that if, say, Uber was able to keep going for more than a decade, there must be some way it will eventually be profitable.

Moving around and playing open file formats is some of the most basic functionality we expect from computers, but it doesn't take much to figure out why it's nearly impossible to do so on mobile devices. If we could do this outside the apps they control, Apple and Google would be less able to lock us in, and less able to shake down the people who make the content we play, listen to, read, and watch. After all, the iPhone's predecessor, the iPod, had no trouble with this kind of operation-the ability to easily download and play music without using an app has been removed from the devices that came after it.

Interoperability is essential to competition. Your sneaker maker doesn't get a veto over whose socks you wear. We have done away with coal bosses who pay in noninteroperable scrip that can only be spent at the company store. Microsoft couldn't stop Apple from making the iWork suite, which reads and writes every one of Microsoft Office’s baroque file formats.

Audible created its returns policy to lock in its customers and keep competitors out of the market, and forced the most atomized and powerless people in the system to subsidize it. It was good for consumers, good for Audible, and disastrous for independent writers. You could not ask for a better example of how the "consumer welfare" test—the idea that we only fight monopolies when consumers suffer as a result of their actions—turns artistic audiences into accomplices to programs that destroy creative workers' lives.