From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

Cory Doctorow's stupidly titled book "Enshittification"
(2025) has incisive subject material:

"But the internet's early blush of disintermediation faded quickly.
Waves and mergers and acquisitions consolidated the internet into
'five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other
four'. Meanwhile, the NON-tech intermediaries were also consolidated:
most of the key sectors of the global economy shrank to
five or fewer firms, and the most pronounced consolidation took
place with intermediary sectors like shipping and finance. The
entertainment industry, too. Remember the early-2000s dream of
disrupting the DOZEN major publishers? Today, there are FIVE major
publishers, FOUR major studios, THREE major labels, TWO companies
that dominate apps, and a SINGLE company that dominates ebooks
and audiobooks."

-- from page 9

I can recommend his book Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), that
makes similar observations, especially his coverage of the
music industry, there being three music companies and they act
in concert, as if they are divisions of the same company.
They used their monopoly power to write the rules of
downloading and streaming from 2002 to the present, such as
forbidding lossless downloads from the other record companies in
2002 on itunes and amazon (or so I infer) or stripping of the
revenues generated from users listening habits on Spotify to a
single pool as demanded by Universal Music, Sony and Warners,
to keep individual listeners from directly affecting revenues
to artists. The revenues, of how much and how it's distributed,
is a trade secret, it's safe to assume something is going
wrong in this highly profitable monopoly industry. The
author taught me what "rent-seeking" is in an understandable
way.

It needs to be pointed out that the purpose and effect of
monopolization of industry is inefficiency / political power /
corruption accrued from the enforced lack of consumer choice,
whether or not this crime is called consolidation or innovation.

Doctorow's overall ideas are stupid though, in the 2022 book,
like his suggestion that the problem of copyright clearances
and revenue should be solved by a world monopoly institution,
or that white artists have no right to complain because black
artists were treated worse. Or his blame for monopolized
industry on the individual called Robert Bork, a trendy thing to
do, as if symbolically attacking an isolated politician of the
past is a current value of today; should every monopolist be
apologized for if they made the symbolic statement of saying
Robert Bork is abhorrent? I assume the same stupid sort of
conclusions are in his recent book.






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