Chokepoint Capitalism
A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
38mentions
28people
2022–2026years
47% recommend50% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- https://airesistlist.org/ (currently down: see the Internet Archive) has links to several concrete projects, including https://di.day/en (see also, https://european-alternatives.eu/, https://switching.software/). The IndieWeb (https://indieweb.org/) and the Fediverse[1] are both movements to take back parts of the internet. We can all make small changes in our lives: what would you do, if you refused to acknowledge the existence of Big Tech, and needed to choose another approach? And can you do this, in practice?
Low-tech Magazine (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/) has enough articles to publish a thematic book, “How To Build a Low-tech Internet?”. There are other books with concrete proposals: pretty sure Cory Doctorow's published a few (Chokepoint Capitalism, also by Rebecca Giblin; Enshittification; possibly others). You can read these if you would like. But the important part is using and maintaining credible alternatives, reducing both our dependence on and support of these companies.
[1]: although more work is needed to reduce the addictiveness / increase the user empowerment of Fediverse UIs (which are largely modelled on the corresponding Big Tech social media systems): websites are still the way to go, if you can.
- Most of Google's value is the moat they've built around the things that bring in money... their advertising market, google play store, vertical integration, etc. See also Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism.
Building even a tiny fraction of those moats is mind-bogglingly difficult. Building a third of that moat is insanely hard. To claim that the AI industry's "expected endgame moat size" is one-third of Google's current moat is a ludicrous prediction. You'd be better off playing the lottery than making that bet.
I would be happy to bet against this if I could do it without making a Keynes-wager (that I can remain solvent longer than markets remain irrational), but I see no way to do so. Put options expire, futures can be force-liquidated by margin calls, and short sales have unlimited downside risk.
- You should check out Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. To put it briefly, you've been fooled.
You're making an argument that empowers the likes of Amazon, not "writers", and it's by design that you've been fed that story.
- > The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center.
Exactly.
Networks (markets) operators must be prohibited from competing on their own networks.
Apple's App Store must be spun off as a separate entity.
Amazon cannot offer their own competing products on their Marketplace.
Google must divest their digital advertising from their search engine (or vice versa).
Doctorow & Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism is a terrific take on our current rentier economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokepoint_Capitalism
- This is awesome and it's one of the countermeasures that the book Chokepoint Capitalism proposed against enshittification.
Imagine seeing Twitch, Nebula, Youtube, etc all in one aggregator app, then the switching cost of leaving one platform to another goes way down. If a content creator wanted to move from one platform to another to get a better deal, the users would hardly notice.
Unfortunately I think DRM + DMCA makes this illegal, e.g. removing DRM from a Netflix stream to use a third-party app is illegal even if there is no copyright infringement. This needs to be fixed.
- Cory Doctorow's books "Chokepoint Capitalism" and "The Internet Con" discuss a good number of possible reforms, if anyone is interested
