Chokepoint Capitalism. How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back

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, and where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers-or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue that 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-a problem that 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 to 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 creative industries, Giblin and Doctorow reveal 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.
Then, they break down how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights and collective action to ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away—before it's too late.