> every plaintiff could just define a market a certain way, they would never lose a single anti-trust case
This goes both ways. My corner bodega has a monopoly over its intersection.
In practice, we need legislation defining anti-competitive behavior for platforms and Thompsonian aggregators [1]. I haven't seen anyone propose a sensible, predictable framework.
> You've probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry's unwillingness to pay creators what they're worth. Maybe you've also heard the rebuttal – that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators' pockets.
> That right there is the false binary – either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if – and hear me out here – Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the "talent"? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
The search results are filled with adverts for Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book, but Cory Doctorow hasn't tagged many of those adverts "chokepoint capitalism": his website lists examples, instead. https://pluralistic.net/tag/chokepoint-capitalism/
> Chokepoint capitalism is where one party becomes both a monopoly and a monopsony: a gatekeeper, or "chokepoint". This gives it more leverage than any single other party, which it uses to extract and exploit with impunity. ⸻ While it may once have added value, once an entity becomes a chokepoint, it can cease to add value, and even start making people's lives actively worse ("enshittification"), without losing its position of power.
> What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
I agree with all the examples. I just struggle to see a framework. How has he defined the monopoly? That’s what we are looking for. A new definition for antitrust, ideally separate from the definition of monopoly and its market-definition magic variable.
If argue it's when one has "more leverage than any single other party", either on the buying or selling side. And it could be based on a raw percentage of units or market revenue, whichever portion is bigger.
Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.
Leverage isn't about "the market", either. It's about the individual people, and their situations. The iOS App Store doesn't give Apple much leverage over iPhone users, but iCloud does – and, to a lesser extent, iMessage¹ and FaceTime do. (The flipside of the iPhone's many planned obsolescence strategies is that you have to choose whether to remain within Apple's ecosystem every three-to-five years, and iPhones are expensive.)
The iOS App Store does give Apple significant power over the authors of apps. Even if the App Store doesn't provide a chokepoint by itself, the iPhone “ecosystem” as a whole does. It's a different thing to antitrust, though the more egregious offenders might also constitute monopolies for antitrust purposes.
On Cory Doctorow's "competitive compatibility" / "adversarial interoperability" theme, a company called Sunbird Messaging claims to have made an iMessage clone for Android. It's proprietary, and might turn out to be vapourware, but I'm hopeful.
This returns us to the problem of defining the market, however. Platforms, specifically, exploit this ambiguity by escaping straightforward definitions of market share.
I'm not Cory Doctorow, and I don't read him enough to know his arguments, but my artist acquaintances all say that Spotify is a terrible deal. This article is a collection of such anecdotes: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...
> Documenting the group’s last show before the coronavirus hit, the pay-what-you-want release generated $4,200 from nearly 700 buyers in just two days. That’s more than 75 Dollar Bill have made through streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube over the last six years. “Streaming is a joke,” Chen tells me. “We might make $100 a year from streaming. On a recent statement of mine, the royalties for one track that had 580 plays on Spotify was zero dollars and 20 cents.”
> Unlike Bandcamp, Spotify’s royalty rate is difficult to ascertain, using a model which pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed – which benefits the Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts of the world far more than it does any struggling artist or independent creator.
> Per stream royalty rates on the platform have been gradually declining for years. One recent estimate suggested the figure averaged around $.00348 per stream, or $3,300 – $3,500 per million plays.
If anyone can explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me, I'd appreciate it. I've heard that claim a lot, but I don't really understand how the pricing model is bad. (It feels like the kind of pricing model that admits sleight-of-hand, but that's all.)
Spotify is a terrible deal, but even the "good ones" like Apple Music and Bandcamp aren't much better. My artist acquaintances all agree, but it's not like they're making bank on YouTube music or anything. All digital music distribution sucks now. Spotify is just one of the more desperate moochers.
> explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me
It's not uncommon, especially in scenarios where distributors can strongarm artists into signing their agreements. In the world of gaming, progressive distribution models are very common, where Steam/Epic/Sony takes a smaller cut as you get sell more units.
The unfortunate fact is that boiling down digital music sales gets you two things - file distribution and payment processing. And the payment processing costs money.
This goes both ways. My corner bodega has a monopoly over its intersection.
In practice, we need legislation defining anti-competitive behavior for platforms and Thompsonian aggregators [1]. I haven't seen anyone propose a sensible, predictable framework.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/