Chokepoint Capitalism

Gilbin and Doctorow weave together research from economics and antitrust law with insights from case studies on a variety of creative industries to paint a stark picture of the failings of the Chicago School of antitrust and illustrate how modern platforms have significantly increased their power at the expense of worker earnings and innovation. The stats they bring to bear on these topics are powerful, and some of the cases are simply shocking at the extent to which they embody the raw power grabs and anticompetitive tendencies of the neoliberal marketplace.

The second portion of this book is focused on suggested fixes, which feels somewhat wanting. Many of these chapters consist of spitballing ideas with little attempt to validate these approaches in the literature, with some of the proposed solutions already having been shown to not be effective. That coupled with some concerning factual errors (the point about private equity returns being equal to the general market is demonstrably false) made me wonder about the veracity of the other points in the book. Overall I still highly recommend the book, but I would also recommend reading some of the more grounded academic literature before taking the points in the book as "the truth."

Doctorow is known for his activism in favor of the open web and privacy rights. In this book, with Rebecca Giblin, they describe how the corporate monopolies and monopsonies are strangling the culture industry and especially creators and makers upon whose content and creativity these corporations and platforms rely. And so, we learn a lot about how Amazon, Spotify, Live Nation, and Youtube, among others, have created bottlenecks (or chokepoints, hence the title) between creators and audiences, to the detriment of both. This accomplished through network effects, vertical and horizontal integration, blocking new entrants, regulatory capture, and manipulation of copyright laws, as well as non-compete clauses which lock in workers (as time of writing, FTC chair Lina Khan is proposing to eliminate those, which would be great). The first part of the book describes these mechanisms in clear detail. The second part of the book focuses on potential solutions to break those chokepoints and restore competition for healthier, more pluralistic, and more competitive cultural markets. Such potential solutions include reform of copyright and antitrust laws, unionization and minimum wage for cultural producers, among other things. The authors specify that, while the focus of the book is the cultural sector, monopolies and monopsonies exist elsewhere in our economies. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because it does go into the weeds of the cultural sector, which is sometimes tedious to read, especially in the second part of the book. That being said, it is well worth reading and important.