Intellectual Property and the Fissured Economy

What a baller article. Omgosh. Puts together so much of how our economy has ossified into place, how platforms and control have become the dominant force, much against the public good, against diverse & flourishing possibility.

> In short, with few direct employees, Apple earns enormous profits, invests very little relative to its overall economic footprint, faces limited effective competition, owns vast amounts of legally protected intangible assets, and thus epitomizes many of the features of our current economy.

The focus on IP as control is huge. But it gets worse still. Now tech - backed by absurd DMCA anti-circumvention - allows these worldwide fiefdoms to deny outside agency via legally enforced technocratic dominion.

I ran across Robin Berjon's 2023 book recommendation thread (via Half Built Garden, a great book on daiperpunk eco-conwcious economic mutualism that touches upon some of these threads but isn't my point here), and the first book How Data Happened quickly went on my to-read list with a wonderful quote about how tech has tipped the game to hold all the cards, how it has become supreme leverage of control over everyone else:

> As private companies have come to form the infrastructure for technology ecosystems, they rely on each other-and thereby coerce each other. Apple has, for exam- ple, shocking power to influence other companies that wish to have their app available on the iPhone. In Super Pumped, Mike Isaac describes a visit by the then-CEO of Uber to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who explains in no uncertain terms what data policies are going to be allowed in the app if Uber wants to remain in the App Store.15 Similarly, Facebook and other data-enabled companies wish to remain in Apple's app store, which therefore functions like infrastructure. Effec- tively, these companies can deplatform each other, as when Google punishes a company by changing the search algorithm in ways that hurt that company's search ranking, leading to a huge financial loss. These corporations have the opportunity to affect each other, both by positioning themselves, as when Apple celebrates privacy as a fundamental human right to poke at Google and Facebook and by actually deplatforming each other. ... In our analysis of power these represent an important set of arrows among corporate powers.

https://bsky.app/profile/robin.berjon.com/post/3jukn3wzpin26

It's just so against what the humanistic endeavor sings of, what tech should be doing, which is opening possibility. The law has been onboard extending legal anti-liberal-world corporate-domination at nearly every turn. Threads on IP here & everywhere are rancorous in extreme & deservedly so. How this mismatch between people & government-corproate rulership has gotten so completely out of whack, has seen so few rebalances, for so long, is unimaginable & terrible. This article does a great great job writing this up & I'm so thankful to see it.