To sell its books on Amazon, Melville was told that it needed to hand over fees to boost its titles on Amazon’s website and in its algorithms. One of the earliest indications of just how brutally Amazon would come to wield its power came in May 2004, when Melville House, a fledgling independent book publisher, found itself at the mercy of a chokepoint. These struggles, in other words, are a warning for the rest of us. But every industry is vulnerable to the price-setting and power-concentrating characteristics of these firms. Chokepoint capitalists don’t just offer a means for creators and audiences to exchange art for money they provide one of the only means by which that exchange can happen-while shortchanging creators by setting unsustainably low prices for their art, and skimming off most of whatever profit that art manages to generate. But for creators, chokepoint capitalists-the firms that control access to their work-are an exploitative nightmare. Spotify offers tens of millions of songs and podcasts for less per month than what we pay for a single CD. Books on Amazon are cheap and arrive quickly. These companies are different from the standard middlemen that exist in many capitalistic relationships between buyers and sellers, because they have seized complete control of the channels by which culture reaches its audiences.įrom the consumer’s perspective, the problem might not seem so immediately obvious. Lodged in the middle of the hourglass are the chokepoint capitalists: the Amazons (and Spotifys and YouTubes and Apples and Googles and other “predatory rentiers”-companies that make money by charging “rent” to anyone who wants to use their services). In their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, Rebecca Giblin, a professor at Melbourne Law School, and Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and best-selling science-fiction novelist, portray creative markets not as two-way freeways but instead as hourglasses, with authors, musicians, and other artists at one end and consumers at the other. It’s certainly not Amazon’s novel.īut your relationship with-and, more specifically, your financial support for-Jeffers and other creators is not so straightforward. Du Bois, for instance, is clearly Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s novel, not her publisher’s. You generally know the creators by name and credit them for their work. Think about the art and culture you consume-the books, music, movies, and podcasts. Today, nearly three decades since its founding, the company has indeed replaced these businesses with an even bigger and more centralized gatekeeper: Amazon itself. In 2012, Jeff Bezos claimed in a letter to Amazon shareholders that the company was serving humanity by eliminating old-fashioned “gatekeepers,” like book publishers, that stood between creators and their audiences.
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