Why Content Is King

If the US cable TV companies wanted to shut down access from Apple/Netflix/Disney and force them to go via the cable TV company like they used to, they technically could (cable TV internet is the only high download bandwidth option for most Americans). They wouldn’t brazenly do this by shutting down access completely, but they are doing this via throttling and I could see rate limiting certain services in the future unless you pay more, etc. Or Comcast can exempt itself from data caps.

At the end of the day, the owner of the pipe that comes into your house or the wireless signals has the technical power to control what comes in and out and at what cost. Which is why it should be a publicly owned utility.

The book seems to be J. W. Click, Russell N. Baird, Magazine Editing and Production (https://www.worldcat.org/title/magazine-editing-and-producti...). W. C. Brown Company, 1974, 274 pages. (Google Books preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=lMpHwLnvsvAC&q=%22content+...)

Earlier appearances in the 1960s refer to educational films (https://www.worldcat.org/title/toward-improved-learning-a-co...). (Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=LiQgAQAAMAAJ&q=%22content+...)

A discussion based on this premise should at least get the provenance straight.

Aguments over provenance notwithstanding, my view is that the aphorism is a convenient bit of stage distraction attractive to media monopolists themselves aware of the real truth: network control is emperor. Andrew Odlyzko argues this; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=235282 (as @fmajid notes elsewhere in this thread)

And this goes beyond just getting the proprietor's cut, the vigorish, skimming your 5, or 10, or 30%.

Central control of a network means deciding what that network is. Where it begins, where it ends, what goes in, what comes out, who can receive, who can send, what interactions are possible, speeds and latencies, what messages are heard, what are not, who pays, who gets paid, who plays for free.

These factors are wholly ignored by contemporary US (Borkian) antitrust doctrine.

It's not just the vig.

Sumner Redstone died this past August at 97; (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/obituaries/sumner-redston...) (NYTimes).

A $60 game is sold to a retailer for $38-45. The publisher takes 20 of that (nintendo in this case) and the advertising & developer take the remaining 20. So nintendo probably takes 40 dollars profit from first party games like Zelda.

Margins on consoles used to be lower, $10-20 and they'd make $40 on the controller sales. The joycons on the switch cost 45 to make and sold for 50. The margin is back into the console as a whole again.

Digital sales on ingame items are likely close to pure profit.