Chokepoint Capitalism: how to beat Big Tech and Big Content to get artists paid
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 07/12/2022

Corporate concentration (and profits) have breached the stratosphere. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers), monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both. In their new book, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue that the result is ‘chokepoint capitalism’: rigged markets where powerful corporations have managed to position themselves between workers and customers in ways that allow them to extract far more than their fair share of value.

Nowhere are chokepoints more endemic than creative labor markets. In this conversation with Rebecca Tushnet, Giblin and Doctorow discuss breathtaking abuses being carried out almost every place creativity meets money: book publishing; Hollywood screenwriting; game development; news; music streaming, publishing, and ticketing, and more. Deconstructing the playbook used by Big Tech and Big Content to create their chokepoints, Giblin and Doctorow show the problem to be fundamentally one of power imbalance. But they' have also discussed their detailed, rousing, unabashedly hopeful proposals for change, showing how creators and audiences can work together to widen chokepoints out—and get artists paid.