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[...] 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.
interesting history
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.
crazy
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.
Systemic problems can’t be solved with individual actions alone. Your individual purchase decisions, which services you do or don’t create accounts on, whether you recycle, and whether you drive or take the bus make almost no difference to our social outcomes. If we want to change the world, we have to fix the system. We need social solutions. Political solutions. The most important individual action you can take is to join a movement. And what we need right now is a movement against chokepoint capitalism—one that finds new tools to cut through the roots of monopolistic and monopsonistic power.
hell yeah
These limitations are why even antitrust specialists look toward other forms of regulation, especially for reining in abusive buyer power. We should absolutely be using antitrust and its remedies to their full capacity, but we shouldn’t rely on them to do all the heavy lifting. And we don’t need to! As historian Gabriel Winant points out, antitrust was far from the only factor that helped labor improve its share in the early twentieth century: “Whether or not you rate antitrust as important, it still beggars belief to see it as a more significant force in the remaking of American society in the 1930s than the insurgency of millions of industrial workers and the wave of reforms they won: the National Labor Relations Act, which established union rights; the Social Security Act, which created the eponymous program as well as family assistance and unemployment insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage and banned child labor; and, indirectly, legislation touching on housing and urban development, veterans’ policy, and more.” Considered through this more expansive lens, we have plenty of tools to help brake those anticompetitive flywheels and start taking back the value of culture.
sick
The point of radical interoperability isn’t merely to provide “choice” or “competition” or “innovation,” or any other empty Silicon Valley buzzword: it’s to let people decide for themselves how to live their lives. It’s to clear the way for the exercise of self-determination. You, the user of a product or service, know more about your needs than its designers ever will. A farmer with a hailstorm on the horizon knows whether she wants to trust her own tractor repair to bring in the crops to a degree John Deere will never be able to match. A person with a physical or cognitive disability knows more about how they need to adapt their tools than even the most empathetic design team. A person who is poor, or facing an emergency, or in physical danger, knows more about whether it’s appropriate to change the operation of a product than the company that made it. Good products and services—like good art—routinely outlive their makers. You know more about how you want to use a computer program to recover your old working files than the company that made it ten years before.
The case for interoperability isn’t about creating competitive markets in which the best products win. It’s about creating a world of tools, devices, and services that are under the control of the people who depend on them.
While news has perhaps the most immediate potential to co-operatize against the giants, co-ops in other culture industries are also managing to carve out niches in the gaps left by Big Business in ways that hint at a different kind of future. Scholar-activist Trebor Scholz argues that platform cooperativism’s importance comes less from destroying “the dark overlords” and more from “writing over them in people’s minds, incorporating different ownership models, and then inserting them back into the mainstream.”20 Liz Pelly has a similar view. In the context of music, she calls alternative distribution means “protest platforms,” arguing that “the means through which music is created and distributed carries as much political weight as the content of the songs—by subverting the status quo, making their own platforms, and creating alternative worlds.”21
There’s potential for grander-scale initiatives too—like entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole’s radical proposal for an American Music Library. He envisages this as a government-financed digital public music library, which, like a public library for books, could be accessed by any American for free. Artists and composers would opt in by uploading their music and their labels and publishers would be barred from stopping them. As Pelly points out, “we don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should.”
In Cole’s vision, a music library could also have a preservation role, keeping copies of uploaded music for future generations. But what he is perhaps most excited about is the possibility of a new royalty system that bypasses the insane complexity and wastefulness of the one we have now.
sweet