In September 2022, Beacon Press published chokepoint-capitalism-book, co-written by Doctorow and rebecca-giblin, an Australian legal scholar and expert in creators' rights. The book represented the fullest synthesis of Doctorow's political economy turn during the chokepoint-and-monopoly-era-2016-2022 and placed his arguments in dialogue with academic research, legal analysis, and comparative international evidence.
The book's central argument is that a small number of bottleneck intermediaries — Amazon in books, Spotify and major labels in music, Google and Facebook in advertising, a handful of app stores in software — use their chokepoint positions to extract value from creators while degrading the product for audiences. This is chokepoint-capitalism: not monopoly in the traditional sense of one seller, but control of the chokepoints through which value must flow.
Giblin's contribution brought rigorous economic and legal analysis to arguments Doctorow had been making in more polemical form on pluralistic-net and boing-boing. The collaboration also gave the book reach in academic and policy communities that Doctorow's solo work, aimed at general audiences, could not always access. The combination of legal scholarship and accessible prose made chokepoint-capitalism-book useful both for policymakers and for creators trying to understand their situation.
The book connected Doctorow's work to the broader antitrust revival: lina-khan's FTC was already pursuing platform cases, matt-stoller was writing about industrial policy and monopoly, tim-wu had returned to government, and zephyr-teachout had published her own work on corporate power. Chokepoint Capitalism gave this coalition a framework specifically focused on creator exploitation, extending the enshittification analysis to the supply side of the platform economy.
The analysis directly informed the-internet-con (2023), which focused on interoperability-mandates as the primary remedy — the policy prescription that followed from the chokepoint diagnosis.