Thread by @doctorow

Joe Rogan is getting $100m in exchange for putting his podcast behind Spotify's paywall.

mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-the-spoti…

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Spotify has been on an extraordinary, acquisition- and exclusivity-driven spending spree, buying 15 companies, and doing deals like this one with Rogan. Wall Street loves this, and the Rogan deal sent Spotify's share price soaring.

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Why does Wall Street like this? Because acquisition-driven growth is a great way to establish a monopoly in which rents are extracted from suppliers and customers to the benefit of shareholders.

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That's why traditional, pre-Reagan antitrust banned "mergers to monopoly" and acquisitions of nascent competitors. Growth through acquisition means that companies succeed by having more money, not by having better products or prices. It's a winner-take-all death spiral

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As @matthewstoller points out, even Rogan admits there are no consumer benefits from this deal: "It will be the exact same show. I am not going to be an employee of Spotify. We’re going to be working with the same crew doing the exact same show.”

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In other words, the only difference is enclosure: taking something from the federated, open, competitive web and sticking it inside a walled garden. It's the App Store strategy, the Facebook strategy, the AOL strategy, the MSN strategy.

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The internet is running out of open, federated platforms. There's the web (those parts of it that Facebook hasn't swallowed), email (same, but Gmail), RSS, and some Fediverse tools like Mastodon.

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They're like national parks, tiny preserves for the open spaces that once dominated the landscape. And like national parks, every time they are discovered to have something good, a plute comes along to enclose them and charge admission.

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