Culture has been captured. Three massive conglomerates own the three record labels and three music publishers that control most of the world’s music. They designed the streaming industry, dominated by Spotify, which itself is (or was) partly owned by those same three labels. When Disney swallowed 21st Century Fox, a single company assumed control of 35 percent of the US box office. Google and Facebook have a lock on the digital ads that are wrapped around music, videos, and news online. Google, along with Apple, is the gatekeeper of everything mobile, giving it a massive cut on games, books, music, and movies. Via YouTube, it controls video streaming. Live Nation has sewn up ticketing and concerts. In the US, one company dominates terrestrial radio, and another satellite. Amazon has an iron grip on book, ebook, and audiobook sales, and dominates ebook and audiobook production. The only publisher that might be able to hold its own is Penguin Random House, and then only by gulping down as many other big publishers as it possibly can. The Big Six trade book publishers had become the Big Five by the time we started writing this book, and are making moves to become the Big Four by the time it’s published.

The reason creative workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth generated by their work is the same reason all workers are receiving a smaller share—we have structured society to make rich people richer at everyone else’s expense. The playing field has been tilted so far that a growing number of people are falling off the edge, beset by precarious employment, stagnating wages, high costs for education, housing and healthcare, and economic policies that prize shareholders over people and communities.

Then the Chicago School pulled off a brilliant coup. They promoted an antitrust theory that dispensed with the idea of citizenship altogether; instead, they insisted anti-monopoly regulators should limit themselves to thinking about “consumer welfare,” forgetting all that high-minded stuff about “democracy” and “citizenship.” Bork’s version of antitrust concerned itself primarily with maximizing short-term consumer welfare—mostly in the form of lower prices—rather than promoting competition as an end in and of itself. (We emphasize “short-term” because it turns out that once fields are cleared of competitors, consumer benefits like lower prices evaporate fast.)

Putting the focus on consumer welfare changed the calculus completely. So long as prices went down (or at least, didn’t go up), companies more or less stopped having to worry about antitrust enforcers showing up with subpoenas. That meant they could use predatory pricing to squeeze smaller rivals out of markets. It also meant they could dangle the promise of new efficiencies and lower prices to persuade regulators to let them buy up competitors that were previously out of bounds.

While competition is supposed to be central to capitalism, the wealthiest people alive today have gotten rich by suppressing it. They’re brazen about it too. Peter Thiel famously announced in 2014 that “competition is for losers” and counseled companies to monopolize their domains. Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up. Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,” because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”

That language disguises what’s really going on here. When Buffett talks about moats, he means the kind of barriers that lock in customers and suppliers and make markets inhospitable to new entrants. These corporations are not protecting castles from marauders. They are creating chokepoints that separate producers from consumers so they can capture a disproportionate share of the value from other people’s work.

We agree there is an urgent need to reform antitrust law and enforcement and certainly criticize existing approaches in the pages that follow. But antitrust should not be relied upon to do all the heavy lifting. In this book, we explore how the chokepoints enabling corporations to extract more than their fair share of value are formed in the first place. Very often, as we will show, legal structures outside of antitrust contribute substantially to the accumulation of vast corporate power. For example, Amazon chokes publishers by chaining audiobook and ebook titles with digital locks that are illegal to remove. (This might sound like it’s to the benefit of authors and publishers, but as we show in the next chapter, it has been crucial to stripping away their power.) Spotify does it to recording artists and labels through playlistification, which trains us to let it decide what we listen to, and by relying on fiendishly complex music licensing arrangements to keep competitors out of the market. Apple and Google get the power to squeeze game developers from their ability to control where we get our mobile phone software. Facebook and Google captured the market for news advertising by controlling all sides of the market for ads.

[...] Platforms are often distinguished from traditional “pipeline” businesses, which have producers at one end and consumers at the other. But these create chokepoints too: as when record labels and music publishers accrue vast reservoirs of copyrights and use them to extract maximum value for themselves while simultaneously preventing creators from getting better deals. The problem lies not in the type of business, but in the ability to create hourglass-shaped markets, with customers paying money at one end, suppliers and workers creating value at the other, and a small number of predatory rentiers controlling access in the middle. Creators earn little from the culture they produce not because of platforms per se—even if tech platforms are the major culprits right now—but because their supply chains are colonized by powerful corporations who co-opt most of its value.

The key to achieving this is anticircumvention rules, which were first mandated in 1996 via a pair of international copyright treaties.15 Developed in response to fears from rights holders that the easy copying and distribution facilitated by the internet might destroy their business models, the treaties require member countries to prohibit the bypass of technological measures that are designed to protect against copyright infringement. Such measures, usually called “digital rights management” (DRM), are supposed to guard against unauthorized copying, and indeed the treaty drafters carefully limited the scope of the obligation to just that, with the WIPO Copyright Treaty expressly specifying that the obligation didn’t “go further than the scope of copyright.”16 But that limitation was almost universally ignored by countries that implemented the treaty. The US version, contained in section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), makes it a crime—punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense—to tamper with a software-based lock that restricts access to a copyrighted work. This is broader than what was required, as it does not distinguish between tampering with locks for legal or illegal purposes. Instead, once there’s a lock in place that controls access to a copyrighted work, the lock itself becomes sacrosanct.

Despite everything the publishers attempted to drive up the price of ebooks, then, Amazon still succeeded in driving them down. That’s good news for price-sensitive readers, and undoubtedly helps democratize reading and access to books. And it’s terrific for authors who can find an audience on the platform, including the thousands of writers making the kind of middle-class living traditional publishing finds it increasingly hard to deliver. But of course, this phenomenon will be temporary: Amazon’s management doesn’t give writers such a big share because it cares about them, but as a way of weakening traditional publishers. Once they’ve done so and those authors have no other options, they’ll be shaken down too.

Figuring out how to get your program played on a phone without paying a toll to the phone maker isn’t a copyright violation, but it is a business-model violation. Congress could easily have written section 1201 of the DMCA to say, “Bypassing DRM to violate copyright is illegal,” but it didn’t. It created a new crime—“felony contempt of business model”—which actually supports anticompetitive conduct. By giving Apple’s App Store moat the force of law, the DMCA stops it from being competed away, allowing monopolists to keep collecting money that should be going to makers, not rentiers.

And, of course, if all that isn’t enough and a new player is somehow able to enter their kill zone, these behemoths know exactly what to do. Venture capitalists know that too, making them cautious about where they invest, and thus making it even more difficult for nascent competitors to get a toehold. All this explains why supracompetitive profits (like Google’s with YouTube) aren’t enough to attract new entrants like the Chicago School still insists they will.

This shows that simply blaming Big Tech for bankrupting culture workers is too blinkered a view. All large firms with excessive power use it to divert maximum value to shareholders and executives: it’s the chokepoints that are the problem. If we really want to make a difference to what ends up in creators’ pockets, that’s what we have to target.