The Justice Department just handed a Trump donor’s son a media monopoly. David Ellison, the Paramount Skydance chief executive whose father Larry Ellison bankrolled the president’s campaigns, is buying Warner Bros. to lock out the streaming rivals, and the Department signed off because its lawyers wear consumer-welfare blinkers that see only the marginal price dip a bundled subscription might offer. That blinkered view is exactly what the merger’s architects counted on—the lower price is bait, not the product. Foreclosure is not a consumer complaint; it is a structural operation, and the mechanism is what Cory Doctorow has correctly named chokepoint capitalism: the consolidation of every layer between the creator who holds the copyright and the audience member who wants to watch into a single monopsonist whose bargaining power is so absolute that no one on either side can walk away. It is the tollbooth at both ends of the bridge—the studio pays it to reach an audience, the audience pays it to reach the studio, and the toll-taker sets both rates. When the Department of Justice looks at a merger, it looks at price. When an engineer reads the technical specification of the transaction, they look at the stack. The stack is what Ellison is acquiring, and the stack is how the foreclosure happens.
The political proximity matters, not because it proves a quid pro quo, but because it establishes the regulatory environment in which this merger was evaluated. A Department of Justice that is politically aligned with the acquiring party does not need to be bribed; it only needs to be staffed by lawyers who share the acquiring party’s view that scale is synonymous with efficiency, and that concentrated market power is a feature of successful capitalism rather than a structural defect to be remedied. The approval is not a corruption; it is a structural alignment. The regulators and the platform are operating from the same playbook, which means the playbook does not have a stop-button.
Under the terms that Warner Bros. shareholders already approved in April, Paramount Skydance will control not only the distribution channels—the legacy cable networks, the Paramount+ streaming service, and the newly absorbed HBO Max infrastructure—but the underlying intellectual-property library that feeds them. HBO Max and Paramount+ are set to merge under a single platform, which is the marketing language for what any database administrator will recognize as a single sign-on, a unified data-pipeline, and a massively expanded training set for the recommendation architectures that will decide what you see. When a platform controls both the pipe and the media that flows through it, it no longer needs to convince the media to stay in the pipe. It only needs to convince the audience that there is no other pipe, and no other well, and no bucket they could carry media in if they tried.
This is where the economic analysis must be precise, because the public discourse has the misleading habit of treating a streaming bundle as a simple consumer product rather than a continuously-tuned mechanism for extraction. Doctorow’s enshittification framework—coined in 2022, elaborated in The Internet Con, and named the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year—describes the four constraints that keep digital platforms from degrading: competition, regulation, the self-help of interoperable tools, and the bargaining power of the workers who build and supply the platform. A merger that eliminates a direct competitor is a direct assault on the first constraint. What follows is predictable. In the first stage of structural decay, the platform is good to its users to lock them in; here, the bundled discount on Max and Paramount+ is the lock. In the second stage, it becomes good to the business customers—the advertisers who buy the audience and the distributors who carry the signal; here, the monopoly over premium sports rights and legacy cable carriage fees is the lever. In the third stage, the platform claws value back from both; and here we are looking at the 1,400-signatory open letter from actors, directors, and filmmakers who have already read the spreadsheet and understand what comes next: fewer production slots, lower residuals, and a monopsony buyer setting the price for creative labour because it has bought the only auction house left.
The mechanism by which that extraction happens is twiddling, to use the term Doctorow credits to the per-user, computer-mediated adjustment of prices, rankings, and visibility that a vertically integrated cloud layer makes possible. When the combined entity controls the recommendation engine, it does not need to hide a competitor’s movie; it simply needs to adjust the ranking weights—and here it is worth being precise about what “the algorithm” actually is, because the public discourse has the misleading habit of treating it as an autonomous arbiter of taste rather than a continuously-tuned set of weights serving a continually-revised margin-optimization function—to ensure that a Paramount-produced series appears in the top twelve results for a historical drama search, while the competitor’s equivalent production is pushed below the fold. This is not malicious, exactly. It is optimization. And the optimization objective is no longer the quality of the recommendation or the satisfaction of the creator; it is the maximization of the margin on the combined platform.
More than 1,400 Hollywood actors, directors, and filmmakers signed an open letter in April opposing the deal, arguing that “the result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.” That letter is not mere celebrity sentiment. It is the voice of the fourth constraint—the labor force—recognizing that consolidation will shift power further away from the people who make the content and toward the entity that controls the distribution chokepoint. When a platform owns both the studio and the streaming service, it can set the terms under which creators are paid, and those terms, as Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin documented in Chokepoint Capitalism, will be calibrated to extract the maximum value from the people with the least bargaining power. The creators who signed the letter understand this intuitively because they are living at the sharp end of the extraction curve; they are the ones whose residuals will be renegotiated downward, whose backend participation will be written out of the new standard contracts, whose independent production companies will find themselves forced to licence their back catalogues to the monopoly at a price that does not cover the cost of production.
The consolidation of steel mills in recent decades taught workers what concentration means: fewer jobs, less leverage, and more value extracted for the benefit of distant shareholders. The entertainment industry is learning the same lesson, just with better catered meetings. The mechanism is the same; only the product is different.
In the software industry, when two architectures merge, the engineers use a word for the process by which redundant systems are removed and overlapping payroll is eliminated: they call it de‑duplication. In the financial press, the same operation is called synergy. The operation is identical: the identification of capacity that the combined entity no longer needs to serve a monopolized market, and the systematic liquidation of that capacity. The Warner Bros. production lot, the Paramount writing staffs, the editorial rooms at the legacy cable news networks—these are not content assets in the financial model; they are cost centres with high fixed overhead and high unionization. The synergies that Wall Street is pricing into this deal are the wages and working conditions of the people who actually build the shows, stripped out over twenty-four months and returned to shareholders as a dividend. After Clear Channel’s radio consolidation in the late 1990s, “synergy” meant gutting local newsrooms while preserving advertising revenue—exactly the script being read in Hollywood now. The mechanism is identical; only the machinery has changed from broadcast towers to rendering farms, and the union contracts are a little longer.
None of this is a reason to stand down. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has said he will soon decide whether to sue to block the merger, and the discovery record his office compiles is the only thing that forces a federal appellate court to look past the Department of Justice’s approval. The deadline is not public, but it is real. The work of stopping this deal now falls to the states—which is to say, it falls to the people who still have the ability to sue, and the will to use it before the deal closes. There is a Polish saying my grandfather used, which translates badly into English but which means, roughly, the work doesn’t care how you feel about it. The work is to file the comment and force the record.