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.
In
the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to
batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from
transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical
interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum
wages for creative work.