Chokepoint Capitalism
Book Author: Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow
Giblin and Doctorow start from a simple observation: when a powerful intermediary wedges itself between creators and audiences, it can ratchet control until value flows one way—upstream. They call these places chokepoints, and they map them sector by sector with case-driven clarity.
In publishing, Amazon’s dual dominance of ebooks and audiobooks isn’t just about market share; it’s about leverage. The book unpacks how “all-you-can-eat” subscription experiments and Audible policies (like frictionless returns that claw back author earnings) shift risk onto writers while tightening the platform’s lock-in. In music, the authors dissect how playlist power, major-label catalogs, and opaque per-stream accounting turn hits into a lottery and long-tail catalogs into rounding errors. Ticketing is a masterclass in vertical integration: the Live Nation/Ticketmaster flywheel extracts fees at every turn and squeezes touring—the lifeblood of many working artists. App stores? The familiar 30% rent and retaliatory rules illustrate how distribution chokepoints metastasize into policy power.
What elevates this beyond a lament is the toolkit. The authors propose practical, often underused levers:
Interoperability and “adversarial interoperability” (comcom)—the legal right (and technical freedom) to connect competing services, break data silos, and enable exit.
Transparency mandates around royalty statements and ranking systems so creators can actually audit what they’re paid and why.
Collective bargaining and unionization where antitrust carve-outs are warranted (e.g., for freelancers) to counter buyer power.
Contract reforms (reversion rights, bans on non-disparagement/NDAs that conceal abuse, limits on perpetual rights grabs).
Targeted antitrust—blocking self-preferencing and acquisitions that entrench bottlenecks rather than expand markets.
Two chapters stood out to me. First, the deep dive on audiobook economics shows how a single platform can set the terms of discoverability, pricing, and even refund logic—an algorithmic policy stack that quietly governs creator income. Second, the look at streaming catalogs demonstrates how playlist gatekeeping shapes demand itself; when distribution becomes curation, bargaining moves from “what is a fair price?” to “will you be seen at all?”
The authors aren’t starry-eyed about tech fixes, but their remedies have real teeth. Reading through the proposals, I couldn’t help translating them into investable primitives: data portability by default, open payment rails with programmable splits, and verifiable provenance for media assets. Pair that with Creator DAOs or cooperatives to aggregate bargaining power, and you get market designs that compete with chokepoints rather than beg them for better terms. On the AI front, their transparency and bargaining theses map directly onto today’s debates about training data provenance and creator compensation.
Why I Recommend This Book
It replaces fuzzy outrage with specific mechanisms—you’ll come away with a checklist of policies, contracts, and product features that actually move money.
The case studies are concrete enough to brief a board or union hall: Audible returns, playlist economics, ticketing verticals, app-store rents.
It’s immediately actionable for founders and investors building alternatives (interoperable infra, new payout architectures, discovery that isn’t pay-to-play).
