Books and books and Miami Book Fair presented an evening with Cory Doctorow discussing choke point capitalism. How big tech and big content captured creative labor markets, and how well win them back. Choke point capitalism is a call action for the Creative Class and labor Labor Movement to rally against the power of big tech in big media. Cory doctorow is a best selling Science Fiction writer and activist. He is special advisor to the electronic frontier, with whom hes worked for 20 years. He is also a visiting professor of computer science, the open university and a Library Science at the university of North Carolina. He is also an Mit Media Lab researcher. Brilliant. He cofounded the cofounding uk open rights group and coowns the website boing boing. He is the author than 20 books, including novels for young adults, graphic novels for middle grade readers, picture books and nonfiction, books on technology politics. You can follow him twitter at doctorow. And before i think of any more time, please wall or a doctor, if you care. Hey, thank you for coming. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. Im a recovering bookseller. Remind you all of how lucky you are to live in a city with an amazing independent bookstore and helping everyone in every city gets. Thank you for coming on to this and helping it out. Someone who rarely allows to focus. I also feel like an honorary south floridian and not my grandparents. If granted snowbirds. And i say that every christmas kind of terminology to help me so, i feel at home here and i just found two carl hiaasen novels that i never was very, very excited. I. I write when im anxious. So i have seven more books in three years. I to see it in the years to come. So i wrote this book about capitalism i wrote it. My colleagues are back and she a wonderful copyright expert from the university of melbourne. We write it remotely during the lockdown over zoom conferences and google collaborations and. Variety had started and i have a taxi cab in melbourne when i was there touring with my wife. Long way. We did a track presentation and it was really about our frustration with the state of copyright laws for 40 years we have watched as copyright has expanded, expanded duration of copyright. The ease with which copyright can be enforced, the penalty for for violating copyright. The scope of could it be copyrighted this only extended over 40 years. The Entertainment Industry got bigger and more profitable over 40 years and ensuring im going the Creative Workers overexposed most of the time has gone down and down for 40 years. And we find yourselves and this weird false binary where are you happy to be on tv user and or team content . Right. Either you are advocating for libraries and for other users of information. Kids who want to make mixtapes and and people who want to upload supercuts to youtube or whatever or your youre advocating artists and you have to choose one of the other and and really advocating for team user of information has become advocating for team tac because its the big tech platforms that have given the users of information and the power to create new works that have information and share them with other users. And so you end up in this bizarre fight where you have people who side with the youtubers and the tok artists of the world rooting for big tech win the copyright wars and you have people who align themselves with the people are signed up to Traditional Media Companies advocating for big content and hoping that they win the copyright wars and really will all we could see is people cheering on these two giants wrestling with each other in the hopes that whichever one won would would view their loyalty with enough generous chastity and thanks that they would dribble a few more once they won the war. And we thought that that was implausible because these companies typically do not dribble a single crumb more than they actually need to. And and when we looked at what was actually in the way of creative laborers getting a larger share of the labor, their work, it had nothing to with how much copyright they had rather it had to do with the structure of the industry that they were in that whether you were making online videos or, whether you were recording artist, or whether were a streaming recording artist that, your sector was controlled by by one to maybe five companies at the most. And that to do business with companies, you had to sign away whatever rights youd gotten under your your deal from congress with copyright just to just to show up on their platform, just to gain access to your audience. And we dubbed this phenomenon point capitalism on the one side of this hourglass shaped market, youve got the creators and on the other side, youve got the audience. And in the middle youve got this pinch. And at the pinch is a company like youtube where the four big publishers or the three big record labels or facebook or the one National Book distributor or the one National Music theater chain, or the three record labels. And as you pass through that pinch, as you pass through that choke point, whatever it is youve been given to protect your rights, gets taken away from you as a condition for passing through it. And so when you think of it that way, giving creators more copyright in the hopes that it will get them more money from their labor is like giving your bully kid more lunch money in the hopes that itll someday buy lunch, right . It doesnt really matter how much lunch money you give your bully kid. The bullies are going to take that to. In fact, even if the go out and launch a nationwide campaign on behalf of americas hungry to get them our lunch money, its still not going to help. In fact, once the bullies having our lunch money, theyre going to pay off the principal. And so we need do something that gets the bullies out of the schoolyard. We need to do something that affects a structural change. Right. Not just a right that you can nominally exercise, but a right that you can practically exercise as a way to shift value from one side of the ledger to the other, from the side of the ledger belonging to large corporations. So the side of the ledger belonging to the workers who produce the material that those large corporations sell and market and distribute. So as we as we kind of worked through this, we notice something funny that while there had been a point early in the napster wars, when the record labels were clearly the villains of the story, after all this were the companies that had done deals with the beatles, where for every lp they sold, they got 0. 01, but the whole cent, 15 of it was retained for marketing expense, and then they had to share the remaining 85 of a penny for ways after paying their manager to his 10 , those labels clearly in the wrong right. There were already we were in the era of Digital Sales and those labels were extra acting a line item off of every royalty that every artist who had a record deal was getting for breakage now, breakage is a line item on royalty statements that dates back when shellac records used to break in the truck between the factory and the record store, and they were taking it out of artists royalties for their right so that if an accountant you may know that the general accepted Accounting Practice the gaap name for that line item is thats why. Right. And so it was very clear that these guys, the bad guys now napster may not been the good guys. I mean, they were just they were moving Fast Breaking things. But there were Companies Like youtube along and other companies that were ways for musicians to directly their audiences and that were offering a better deal. But that as time went by, Companies Like youtube able to extinguish all of their competitors, become the only game in town and the deal that they offered to the recording artists was functionally equivalent to the deal that the record labels had been offering to them, that it wasnt like on the one side you had mustache twirling, and on the other side you had good natured slobs you just had on either people getting what they thought they could get based on the negotiating leverage that they had at the time. You know, its like that final scene in animal farm and forgive me for the spoiler for the 70 year old George Orwell novel, but the final scene in animal farm, the animals who fought a revolution against the men and have been betrayed by their leaders. The pigs gather around the farmhouse where the pigs are eating with the farmers who they made peace with. And they look from the pigs to the and the men to the pigs, and they cant tell the difference. Whats the difference between a youtube executive and a warner Music Executive days . They both had same approach to the talent that up their work and so the question is how do we get to this place . How do we get to this place where the web has turned five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four . What are the structural factors that produced this this market where we have three record labels, four major publishers, one major book distributor, one ebook seller. How do we here . Well, its as so many of our terrible stories do, ronald reagan, actually, it starts a little before reagan. It starts with a guy who is kind of reagans Court Sorcerer is guy named robert bork. Robert bork was a jurist. Although if youve heard of him, you probably know about him because youve heard the term borked, which comes down to us from the time that reagan tried to put him on the Supreme Court and his confirmation hearing went so horribly, badly that we now have a adjective to describe something that goes very badly. We call it borked. Bork had been nixons solicitor general, and among his as many weird and colorful things, he had a weird Conspiracy Theory about how antitrust law in america was supposed to work. So antitrust law in america has these these three foundation laws. Theres the sherman act, theres the clinton act, theres the federal trade act. And the lawmaker who passed these acts was really clear about what they wanted from anti trust in america. Robert sherman stood on the floor of the senate in 1890 and said, if we not allow an a king to rule over us, we should not allow an autocrat of trade to organize our lives and all the things that are important to it. They all viewed the purpose of of antimonopoly regulation to stop companies from gaining so much power that they could control the way that you lived your life, not just raise prices on you. Obviously, thats a thing a monopoly can do that harms you. But also becoming the only player an employer in town, making life worse for everyone who in that town or becoming so important to our political process that they can pollute, do other things that harm all of us within community to be able to destroy our lives in ways that make them completely to be the autocrats of trade. You may know andrew mellon, Carnegie Mellon mellon. Andrew mellon was the man who owned an element all the aluminum in the world belonged to andrew mellon. He was the secretary of the treasury. He got america into like trade deals with sheila just so that his company could get the aluminum franchise from chile. And he used to do random stuff like during the war. He was like, were not selling aluminum to the Aviation Industry anymore. More planes during this war because. The price of aluminum is going down. Yes. And the secretary of the treasury. Yes. Im a high official. But this week, no planes for you. Right. So this is the problem with autocrats of trade is they have parochial interests, they want to do things that are good for them and their shareholders, even when it comes at the expense of the rest of us. And sometimes they become the secretary of the treasury. So thats what these guys were by these these antitrust legislators wrote these seminal laws, the clayton act, a act, the federal trade act, but not according to robert bork. Robert bork said that even if you even though if you read these laws and and if you listen to the speeches that were made by the people who passed these laws and the debates that surrounded laws, even though it was clear that what these people were worried about, what antitrust scholars sometimes call harmful dominance. Right. Just the problem of a company being big per se and being able to like clobber other and push people around that the actual true meaning of antitrust, what they all intended, all along was to only enforce antitrust to the extent that it inflicted harms on consumer welfare and consumer welfare in this context meant just like prices up. So robert bork said the framers of these laws really actually thought that monopolies were super cool, that they were efficient, that if you would only give these like gods who walk among us like men, like, like little jeff bezos the power to do as they please the next day, you would have seen the delivery of all the things in the world right . We just had to get the hell out of their way. And let them get on with making us all better. And the only thing we had to make sure of is that they didnt raise prices while theyre on the way. And basically borks argument, like boiled down a kind of q and on reading of these these laws that like you know if you read like alternate words and left the vowels out, you would eventually find that up was down and left was right in black and white as white. And Robert Sherman actually did quite monopolies. And what this had the effect of was converting antitrust from something that was like team sport where like if antitrust hurting your position as a and you trust was hurting your position a Small Business person or if antitrust was hurting you because it was distorting the high street in your town or the politics of your town or polluting your town, all those things gave you standing. Show up and talk about antitrust. We moved to a world where you could only talk about antitrust if prices were going up, but not just if prices were up. If prices were going up and you could prove the reason the prices went up was because a monopoly was making the prices up. So you may have heard that we have this inflation problem right now periodically that people who run the very Large Companies that make up our economy, like the two companies that make all the groceries. Your Grocery Store are unilever and procter and gamble will like stand up in front of their investors twirl their mustaches and go like people think that theres inflation so weve been able to raise prices isnt that great all of you are getting more profits this year thats thats the thing where actually have monopolies raising prices because they have market power they have monopoly and thats what robert bork said you had to agreements, but you had to prove it. And most of the time, these guys are too smart to trip over their own decks after 45, 40 years, theyre a little arrogant about it. But back then they wouldnt it in writing. They wouldnt stand up in front of people and say prices have gone up because they market power they say prices have gone up because theres an oil shock prices have gone up because our workers want more money. Prices have gone up because the moon is on venus and you had to prove that the prices went up because they had market power. And the only way you could do that by building a mathematical model, these mathematical models could only be built by be built by robert bork and his friends at the university of chicago. And they became de facto sorcerers. Right. If you wanted to do something about antitrust, whereas before you could show up in the court and of Public Opinion and, say this company is abusing its monopoly. Now, when you showed up in the court and stood before the the wise lawmaker that that you could say this company is abusing its monopoly and the court saucers. That is a chicago trained economist would drag a goat into the court and slice it open and spread its guts out and look at the steaming guts and rub his chin wisely and say, i dont think the monopoly is the problem here. And if you said but im looking at the guts of this guy and i think its fine, think that theres a real problem with monopolies. The court saucer could go look who thinks that he can interpret guts of a go, right . Did you go to the university of chicago do you have an economics degree from there the goat is the goat doesnt lie. And so for 40 years we allowed companies to merge monopoly every company in every sector has undergone these kinds of mergers is how we ended up with one National Bookstore, one national blockchain, or one National Book distributor, rather, one National Theater chain and so on. Not just that, two Companies Make all the beer. Two Companies Make all the spirits. If you wear eyeglasses like me, they were almost certainly by a Company Called luxottica essilor. Theyre a company that bought all of their competitors. The way that they work is they bought all the high street merchants, all the stores. So lenscrafters was sears optical target optical sunglass hut and so on. And then they went to the brands that sold there and they said, if you want to continue selling in lenscrafters shoes, optical, target optical and so on you are you need to sell your company us and when they wouldnt sell their company like like not oakley wouldnt sell them they said, fine, youre not for sale in any of the places people buy glasses a year later they went, they bought them for pennies on the dollar. They own all the eyewear brands, they own all the eyewear stores, essilor, the lens manufacturing part of it makes more than half the lenses. They also in im ed which is probably your eyewear and sure its the largest one in the world. Theyve raised the prices glasses 1,000 in a decade right. It doesnt matter what