[swores]

There definitely are ways that publishers could have avoided falling foul of anti-Cartel legislation (my question was about where the line is, ie if they did it legally would it actually benefit them), but...

Spotify and Netflix aren't owned or created by a syndicate of all the major publishers, so that's not actually a counter point. There's a huge difference legally speaking between a company negotiating with lots of rights holders to offer customers all of their content in one place, vs. those rights holders co-creating that platform and running it themselves.

(Not that the distributor has to be owned by a cartel of the rights holders to still abuse their position illegally, eg https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/e-book-retailers-d... - it's just that the cartel aspect is the bit I had been talking about.)

[bborud]

Have we really come to a point where the only business structures we can envision are huge monopolies playing zero-sum games?

Imagine if every publisher offered every book to every service that sells it to consumers? And are free to sell their own and other publishers books? They could even include Amazon. Yes, it would require DRM and a bit of software infrastructure, but guess what: they could choose to fund development of an open source system for managing this.

They can do this. But they won’t. They’d rather be beholden to Bezos and not even try.

I’ll repeat myself: they’d rather get collectively screwed than risk that a competitor might get a small advantage.

[swores]

Slow reply, but: good points!