The new toll economy: how control of chokepoints turns into durable pricing power
- hello50625
- 6 minutes ago
- 6 min read
A €500m EU fine for Apple is one headline, but the larger story is structural: the most profitable positions sit where customers and suppliers have few practical routes around a single interface.
When the European Commission fined Apple €500 million in April 2025 for breaching the Digital Markets Act’s anti-steering rule, it framed the case as consumer choice and fair dealing. The penalty was also a signal about where modern power sits: not only in products, but in the routes other people must use to reach customers.
That logic extends far beyond app stores. In US payments, merchants paid $172.05bn in card processing fees in 2023 to accept $11.240tn in card purchase volume, according to the Nilson Report. That is not a niche cost. It is a system-wide levy embedded in retail pricing.
A new book, The Capture Cycle, which is being published in September 2026, argues that advanced economies repeatedly produce the same outcome: control of a critical access or choke point becomes a revenue stream; that revenue funds legal, technical, and political endurance; endurance expands control. You do not need to accept the book’s conclusions to see why the question matters now. Profit centers are shifting toward infrastructure layers, distribution, payments, measurement, compliance, at the same time as regulators are writing new rules for those layers. For executives and policymakers, the practical issue is whether these systems can stay competitive as they scale, or whether they keep reverting to “toll” dynamics that raise costs and narrow options.
Evidence: five datapoints that frame the pattern
Start with enforcement and cash flows.
Regulatory pressure is moving from theory to fines. The Commission’s April 2025 decision found Apple in breach of the DMA’s anti-steering obligation and imposed the €500m fine. Meta was also fined €200m in the same announcement.
The incentive to defend access via digital platforms is visible in profit margins. Apple’s fiscal 2024 filing shows $96.2bn in Services net sales and a Services gross margin of 73.9%, a profitability profile closer to infrastructure than to hardware.
Payments fees remain large, and they are growing. Nilson estimates US merchant processing fees rose to $172.05bn in 2023, up 7.1% from 2022, alongside $11.240tn in card purchase volume.
Financial scale concentrates influence even without formal control. BlackRock reported $11.6tn of assets under management at December 31, 2024, in its annual filing, scale that positions it as a key counterparty to issuers, exchanges, index providers, and policymakers.
Digital advertising is consolidating around a small set of pipes. EMARKETER projected Amazon’s US ad revenues at nearly $42bn in 2024 (about 13.9% share) and estimated that adding Amazon to Google and Meta pushes the top three above 60% of US digital ad spend that year. Forecasts are not audited facts, but they are a common benchmark for budget planning.
Some of these markets are difficult to price cleanly. Payments economics are split across issuers, networks, processors, and acquirers, with negotiated rates that vary by merchant category and scale. Analysts therefore use industry aggregates like Nilson alongside company filings rather than pretending there is a single “fee.”
Mechanism: how the loop tightens
The mechanism is straightforward, and it does not require villainy.
Step one: an access point becomes hard to avoid. App distribution on mobile OS, card acceptance at checkout, identity verification, ad measurement, and index inclusion all solve societies coordination problems. They standardise interfaces with customers and reduce friction. Over time, the interface becomes the market.
Step two: once alternatives are costly, price-setting shifts to the interface. Fees, search ranking rules, default placements, and technical restrictions start to matter as much as product features. A digital platform does not need to ban competitors to disadvantage them; it can change the economics of reaching users.
Step three: the proceeds finance durability. High profit margin layers can hire top legal and policy teams, shape standards, subsidise preferred behaviours (rewards programmes, bundles, developer tooling), and absorb compliance costs that smaller rivals cannot.
Apple’s anti-steering dispute illustrates the dynamic. The Commission focused on whether developers could direct users to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. Apple’s subsequent adjustments moved the debate from “may developers steer?” to “which fee stack applies under which conditions?”, a shift from one constraint to another, mediated by technical definitions and contractual terms.
Payments show the same structure with different actors. Consumers choose cards based on convenience and rewards; merchants accept cards to avoid losing sales; the cost lands on merchants and, indirectly, on prices. That is why the total fee pool can remain large even when merchants complain loudly: exit is often not credible at scale. Nilson’s $172bn estimate is best read as a measure of how much commerce is routed through intermediated rails, not as a judgement on whether every dollar is unjustified.
The second-order effects are where policy gets complicated. Rules written to increase safety, privacy, or fairness can raise fixed costs. Large incumbents treat those costs as overhead; smaller challengers companies treat them as barriers. The result can be a cleaner system but a more concentrated one.
Counterpoints: three ways to read the same facts
There are credible disagreements, and they matter for policy design.
The efficiency case: Payments and digital platform executives argue that centralised interfaces fund fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and consistent user experience. In this view, large fee pools are not proof of extraction; they are funding for trust and uptime. One payments executive put it bluntly: “If you want zero fraud, you don’t get zero cost.” (That claim is directionally true; the harder question is whether costs track performance.)
The competition-law case: Antitrust lawyers and some regulators counter that enforcement moves slower than platform redesign. Even when rules are clear, the relevant details live in engineering choices and contract terms that can change quarterly. The DMA fine is cited as progress, but also as evidence of how much has to be litigated to alter a single digital platform interface rule.
The disruption case: Sceptical analysts warn against treating concentration as permanent. They point to shifting ad budgets, new distribution channels, and the history of incumbents losing share when switching costs fall. Their argument is empirical: measure multi-homing; portability; and the speed at which users can move without losing functionality. If those improve, the “toll” dynamic weakens.
Each viewpoint implies a different policy risk. Overcorrect and you may undermine security or reliability. Under-enforce and you may lock in high-cost intermediation.
Implications: who gains; who pays; and what breaks the pattern
The winners are organisations positioned at the junction between many buyers and many sellers: app distribution, payments routing, identity, measurement, and benchmark inclusion. They can convert volume into rules and rules into predictable revenue.
The losers are those who cannot credibly walk away: small developers facing opaque fee schedules; merchants with thin margins; consumers who face fewer default options than they think; and regulators forced to govern systems where the regulated party controls much of the technical vocabulary.
What changes the story is not rhetoric. It is whether switching becomes materially easier in practice: technically; contractually; and behaviourally. If users and suppliers can exit with low friction then pricing power leaks. If moving remains expensive then power hardens even under new rules.
What to watch
DMA enforcement follow-through (2026): whether remedies translate into simpler, auditable terms, or into layered compliance paths that preserve pricing power through complexity.
Payments fee transparency and routing rules (2026 legislative cycle): whether merchant pressure yields rule changes, and whether fee totals (Nilson-style aggregates) keep rising faster than purchase volume.
Ad market concentration and measurement standards (2026 budget season): whether the top three platforms’ combined share continues to climb, and whether privacy and attribution changes shift spend or simply reprice access.
Conclusion
The soon to be published book, The Capture Cycle, and it’s framework of recursive capture is most useful as a discipline: follow the money to the interface, then ask how hard it is to route around it. The uncomfortable possibility is that many “open market” moments still end with new intermediaries, new fee schedules, and new forms of dependency. The optimistic possibility is that policy and technology can lower switching costs faster than incumbents can raise them. The key variable is practical exit, whether customers and suppliers can leave without losing reach, data, or functionality. If that becomes real, the toll economy looks less durable. If it does not, today’s fines may change headlines more than outcomes.
To learn more about the up and coming book The Capture Cyle please email hello@62consulting.com
Author: George Lucas
Title: Director, 62 Consulting Pty Ltd
Founder with 30+ years experience in financial services, banking, and technology innovation across Sydney, London, New York, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Thought leader in WealthTech and author of "The Prosperity Revolution"
