Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

Jonathan Taplin had worked in the entertainment industry. This had brought him to see the tech industry as something that had ripped away the revenue streams for artists. He complains that Silicon Valley is dominated by Libertarians that are trying to structure a future world that benefits them. The book cherry picks facts to benefit the author's objections to various tech companies. (Facebook, Google and Amazon are "bad", while Apple is "good")

The World Wide Web was initially envisioned as a an open, decentralized communication source. However, it has evolved to be highly centralized, with a few large companies dominating traffic. The internet sites are visible throughout the world, rather than being restricted to individual localities. There are advantages to the scale. It is more convenient to go to a single source of needs. (Ironically, Google can help keep diversity by exposing even the smallest sites to everyone.)

There is a desire to have higher ad rates for "high quality" content. Content producers advocate that point of view. It costs a lot more to write a high quality article for the New York Times than for Buzzfeed. However, for an advertizer, it is only the engagement with the advertisement that matters. If they get more sales from a junk site, that is more valuable to the advertiser. People do spend a lot of time on "low quality" sites, just like they read "low quality" newspapers. With all sites equally available, it is much more challenging to distinguish the different qualities. Now newspapers are implementing "paywalls" to earn money from content and working to extract money from Google to link to content. This seems to be another "consolidation" effort that will lead to people focussing on a few large gatekeepers. Is this better? Is it sustainable?

Through the 1990s, an artist could count on a regular stream of royalties. This dried up once Napster came about and music was expected to be "free". Napster's success owes a great deal to the greed of the music industry. Companies like emusic and Liquid Audio were selling digital downloads at a time. The major labels saw this as another gravy train. CDs were sold at a higher price point than LPs and cassettes, despite their cheaper production cost. Even with this, people would buy a CD of music they already owned. They were hoping to ride the gravy train by selling a limited set of music downloads at a higher price point. Alas, there was little demand for paying $20 for a Duran Duran catalog album. The various services all had different sets of limited songs. Napster solved all this with a comprehensive service where just about anything could be downloaded. Today streaming has taken over as the primary source of music consumption. These pay up to about a cent per stream. Media sales would pay royalties of 10-25% of price. A song that is listened to thousands of times will earn more on streaming. A physical album that is bought to display would earn the artist just as much as one that was listened to on repeat for months. With streaming, artists are only getting paid for what consumers are actively listening to.

While music has been caught off-guard by change, film has done better. The proliferation of streaming services has provided for many new ways for film and tv show distribution. We are in a golden age of film production. The services may be providing many opportunities for creators, but for consumers it is a pain. There are a large number of different services out there. It is much more difficult to find that which you want.

The author advocates stronger government intervention to control these big business. Ironically, regulation is what helps these companies to be big right now. They got started at a time of near zero internet regulation. Today, the internet is much more heavily regulated. This creates a higher barrier for entry. This even comes down to local businesses. Lawsuits are filed against small businesses for wage theft or misclassifying employees as independent contractors. (The big businesses often have departments that help ensure they are in compliance.) Regulations almost always end up helping the incumbents.

Another proposal was to force companies like Google to license all of their patents. He proposes a cooperative model where artists license Youtube patents to have their own site that lets them maximize their share of revenue. This misses the benefits of network effects. Even without patent licensing, video or audio streaming sites could easily be set up. There are already multiple media consuming sites out there. The challenge is implementing them. Web sites also cost money to set up. 

The author has little bad to say about Apple. This company has been in someway even worse in its monopolist behavior. It focuses on selling things. When selling entertainment media, it works hard to make sure the creators are paid well. The company sells the devices where media are consumed as well as the store where media is purchased. They seek to take a cut for all transactions. Only media that is approved by Apple can be easily consumed. On Apple devices it is impossible to install any app without Apple's blessing.

What is the solution? Instead of fighting libertarianism, we should encourage more of it. We need more opportunities for competitors, rather than more regulations. Or we could go the other extreme and declare some things public utilities. Regardless of what we do, we should also realize that the way we consume media has changed. We still have old gatekeepers along with the new ones. We should be careful not to destroy what is better as a means of keeping what we are familiar with.