Louis-Philippe Véronneau - bookhttps://veronneau.org/2022-11-04T00:00:00-04:00Book Review: Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow2022-11-04T00:00:00-04:002022-11-04T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2022-11-04:/book-review-chokepoint-capitalism-by-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow.html<p>Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent
bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin<sup id="fnref:giblin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:giblin">1</a></sup>. Titled <em>Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and
Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them …</em></p><p>Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent
bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin<sup id="fnref:giblin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:giblin">1</a></sup>. Titled <em>Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and
Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back</em>, it
focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on
creative workers.</p>
<p>The book is divided in two main parts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Part one, <strong>Culture has been captured</strong> (chapters 1 to 11), is a series of
case studies that focus on different examples of market failure. The specific
sectors analysed are the book market, the news media, the music industry,
Hollywood, the mobile apps industry and the online video platforms.</li>
<li>Part two, <strong>Braking anticompetitive flywheels</strong> (chapters 12 to 19), looks at
different solutions to try to fix these failures.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2022-11-04/cover.jpg" width="70%" style="margin-left:15%" title="A picture of the book cover" alt="A picture of the book cover"></p>
<p>Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm
quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book.
They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look
at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or
groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear.</p>
<p>That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or
enjoy this book :)</p>
<p>As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also
monopsonies — a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one
seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar
with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked.</p>
<p>The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer:
there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the
end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide
who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of
monopsonies.</p>
<p>In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by
creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony">oligopsonies</a>, like Amazon<sup id="fnref:amazon"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:amazon">2</a></sup> or major music labels. This creates a
situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of
competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators
have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural
monopsonies<sup id="fnref:natural"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:natural">3</a></sup> are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the
existing ones even stronger.</p>
<p>Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good)
antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Transparency Rights — giving creative workers a way to audit the companies
that sell their work and make sure they are paid what they are due.</li>
<li>Collective Action</li>
<li>Time Limits on Copyright Contracts — making sure creators that sell their
copyrights to publishers or labels can get them back after a reasonable
period of time.</li>
<li>Radical Interoperability — forcing tech giants to make their walled-gardens
interoperable.</li>
<li>Minimum Wages for Creative Work — enforcing minimum legal rates for workers
in certain domains, like what is already done for screenplays in the US by
members of the Writers Guild of America.</li>
<li>Collective Ownership</li>
</ul>
<p>Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a
creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented
in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic.
Chances are I'll reuse some of the exposés in my classes too.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:giblin">
<p>Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the
Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, amongst other things.
<a href="https://law.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/rebecca-giblin">More on her here</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:giblin" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:amazon">
<p>Amazon owns more than 50% of the US physical book retail market and
has an even higher market share for ebooks and audiobooks (via Audible). Not
only this, but with the decline of the physical book market, audiobooks are
an increasingly important source of revenue for authors. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:amazon" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:natural">
<p>Natural monopolies happen when it does not make economic sense for
multiple enterprises to compete in a market. Critical infrastructures, like
water supply or electricity, make for good examples of natural monopolies. It
simply wouldn't be efficient to have 10 separate electrical cables connecting
your house to 10 separate electric grids. In my opinion, such monopolies are
acceptable (and even desirable), as long as they are collectively owned,
either by the State or by local entities (municipalities, non-profits, etc.). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:natural" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Book Review: Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal2020-11-06T00:00:00-05:002020-11-06T00:00:00-05:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2020-11-06:/book-review-working-in-public-by-nadia-eghbal.html<p>I have a lot of respect for Nadia Eghbal, partly because I can't help to be
jealous of her work on the economics of Free Software<sup id="fnref:os"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:os">1</a></sup>. If you are not
already familiar with Eghbal, she is the author of <a href="https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/"><em>Roads and Bridges: The
Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure …</em></a></p><p>I have a lot of respect for Nadia Eghbal, partly because I can't help to be
jealous of her work on the economics of Free Software<sup id="fnref:os"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:os">1</a></sup>. If you are not
already familiar with Eghbal, she is the author of <a href="https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/"><em>Roads and Bridges: The
Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure</em></a>, a great technical
report published for the Ford Foundation in 2016. You may also have caught her
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2AR1owg0ao">excellent keynote</a> at LCA 2017, entitled <em>Consider the Maintainer</em>.</p>
<p>Her latest book, <em>Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source
Software</em>, published by Stripe Press a few months ago, is a great read and if
this topic interests you, I highly recommend it.</p>
<p>The book itself is simply gorgeous; bright orange, textured hardcover binding,
thick paper, wonderful typesetting — it has everything to please. Well, nearly
everything. Sadly, it is only available on Amazon, exclusively in the United
States. A real let down for a book on Free and Open Source Software.</p>
<p>The book is divided in five chapters, namely:</p>
<ol>
<li>Github as a Platform</li>
<li>The Structure of an Open Source Project</li>
<li>Roles, Incentives and Relationships</li>
<li>The Work Required by Software</li>
<li>Managing the Costs of Production</li>
</ol>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2020-11-06/cover.jpg" width="70%" style="margin-left:15%" title="A picture of the book cover" alt="A picture of the book cover"></p>
<p>Contrary to what I was expecting, the book feels more like an extension of the
LCA keynote I previously mentioned than <em>Roads and Bridges</em>. Indeed, as made
apparent by the following quote, Eghbal doesn't believe funding to be the
primary problem of FOSS anymore:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>We still don't have a common understanding about </em>who's<em> doing the work,
</em>why<em> they do it, and </em>what<em> work needs to be done. Only when we understand
the underlying behavioral dynamics of open source today, and how it differs
from its early origins, can we figure out where money fits in. Otherwise,
we're just flinging wet paper towels at a brick wall, hoping that something
sticks.</em> — p.184</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is to say, the behavior of maintainers and the challenges they face — not
the eternal money problem — is the real topic of this book. And it feels
refreshing. When was the last time you read something on the economics of Free
Software without it being mostly about what licences projects should pick and
how business models can be tacked on them? I certainly can't.</p>
<p>To be clear, I'm not sure I agree with Eghbal on this. Her having worked at
Github for a few years and having interviewed mostly people in the Ruby on
Rails and Javascript communities certainly shows in the form of a strong
selection bias. As she herself admits, this is a book on how software <em>on
Github</em> is produced. As much as this choice irks me (the Free Software
community certainly cannot be reduced to Github), this exercise had the merit
of forcing me to look at my own selection biases.</p>
<p>As such, reading <em>Working in Public</em> did to me something I wasn't expecting it
to do: it broke my Free Software echo chamber. Although I consider myself very
familiar with the world of Free and Open Source Software, I now understand my
somewhat ill-advised contempt for certain programming languages — mostly JS —
skewed my understanding of what FOSS in 2020 really is.</p>
<p>My Free Software world very much revolves around Debian, a project with a
strong and opinionated view of Free Software, rooted in a historical and
political understanding of the term. This, Eghbal argues, is not the case for a
large swat of developers anymore. They are <em>The Github Generation</em>, people
attached to Github as a platform first and foremost, and who feel "Open Source"
is just a convenient way to make things.</p>
<p>Although I could intellectualise this, before reading the book, I didn't really
<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grok">grok</a> how communities akin to npm have been reshaping the modern FOSS
ecosystem and how different they are from Debian itself. To be honest, I am not
sure I like this tangent and it is certainly part of the reason why I had a
tendency to dismiss it as a fringe movement I could safely ignore.</p>
<p>Thanks to Nadia Eghbal, I come out of this reading more humble and certainly
reminded that FOSS' heterogeneity is real and should not be idly dismissed.
This book is rich in content and although I could go on (my personal notes
clock-in at around 2000 words and I certainly disagree with a number of
things), I'll stop here for now. Go and grab a copy already!</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:os">
<p>She insists on using the term <em>open source</em>, but I won't :) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:os" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>