Life Under the Un-Free Market

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back

Only five corporate conglomerates publish about eighty percent of America’s books, a concentration of power largely unchanged since the 1990s. But only one company, Amazon, sells about half of America’s books, and nearly all of America’s self-published and indie books. Australian law professor Rebecca Giblin and Canadian author Cory Doctorow consider this squeeze to be a harbinger of future first-world economics, if something doesn’t change soon.

Concentrations of market authority create what our authors call “chokepoints,” where one company has immense power over consumer access. They admit this chokepoint is a casual term, and describe the more technical description: monopsony, a little-known economic force where one or a few buyers control the market. Most monopsonies are also monopolies, since they resell their captive market to us, the general public, who can’t negotiate a better price.

Similar market concentrations obtain throughout the culture industry: three record labels publish most music you listen to, but most audiences only listen anymore through Spotify. And the TicketMaster/Live Nation merger gave one company a death grip on A-list live music. Five studios own most of Hollywood, but even they’re beholden to the Big Four talent agencies.And Google’s stranglehold on the online ad market gives them power over nearly everyone.

These monopsony markets didn’t just happen. Their controllers manipulated market conditions to their advantage, often by misusing antitrust regulation in ways that contradicted why those regulations were written. But since the 1970s, a new market philosophy has dominated. Invented by Robert Bork and popularized by Chicago School economists, the dominant bipartisan theory holds that monopolies and un-free markets are acceptable, provided consumer costs remain low.

Markets, our authors remind us repeatedly, don’t objectively exist. They consist of laws, traditions, ad hoc regulations, and personal agreements, and therefore we humans invent and reinvent markets constantly. This book’s first half dismantles the long processes through which powerful people have captured markets—and market regulations!—to serve the wealthy resource owners, usually at the expense of creative workers, and to the detriment of their audiences.

Rebecca Giblin (left) and Cory Doctorow

The second half switches gears, tackling ways creative professionals have challenged the monopsony market, and potential ways these approaches could expand. Our authors don’t like traditional liberal regulatory approaches. They extend limited praise to the Biden Administration, which has detailed committed professionals to enforce antitrust regulations which have lain mostly dormant since the 1970s. But those regulations were written, they note, for 19th Century markets.

For instance, though union drives are lawful and protected in America, that only applies to directly employed workers. Independent contractors and freelancers can’t organize, because under 19th Century antitrust law, that’s a “price-fixing cartel,” and totally illegal. Unfortunately, many creative professionals aren’t directly employed. And where they are directly employed (as under the Hollywood studio system), they’re frequently employed through agencies, making their contract status legally squishy.

Our authors prefer a hybrid approach. They definitely believe collective action holds the greatest promise for fixing market concentrations, because where the wealthy control markets through money, that money doesn’t mean much if it can’t buy human labor. Collective action requires quick thinking, though: for every solution creative professionals invent, Big Tech capitalists have demonstrated their ability to manipulate that to their advantage, eventually. Modern problems require modern solutions.

They also describe public shaming operations which have worked well. For instance, when Disney bought Lucasfilm, they claimed they bought the rights to everything Lucas did, but not necessarily any obligation to pay creative workers. A loose affiliation of writers and other creatives, let by novelist Alan Dean Foster, pushed a hashtag campaign that humiliated Disney into paying its workers and honoring its contracts. Shaming the rich evidently works.

I’d go further. This book shipped before the TicketMaster/Live Nation catastrophe saw Taylor Swift tickets going for $4000. Our authors describe how Swift previously motivated her mainly young, energetic audience to overturn Spotify’s pay structure, and distribute royalties fairly. Now, that same audience has pushed Congress to hold corporate America accountable, for the first time in two generations. It’s early to say, but this may be the beginning of a movement.

These authors describe the consequences of monopsony economics on creative workers, and how creative workers have resisted. This may seem abstruse to some audiences. But they establish in Chapter One, and reiterate throughout, that the creative industry is a bellwether for the economy overall. The same forces are already spilling into gig work, and may displace white-collar work soon. This isn’t purely academic; it’s about your economic future, and mine.