Between the makers and the buyers of stuff, a new class of players siphons profits far out of proportion to the value they add. This economy is filled with middlemen who tend to make enriching themselves the No. 1 priority. They’re not the folks designing products, making things, or building services. They are the ones sitting at the center, connecting, routing, matching, shipping, delivering, distributing and optimizing every transaction that takes place across modern life. And in an age of platforms, algorithms and digital marketplaces, these intermediaries have quickly emerged as the biggest winners in the entire system without anyone paying much attention.
It’s everywhere, once you begin to look for it. Uber doesn’t own the cars. Airbnb doesn’t own the homes. DoorDash doesn’t cook the food. The Amazon marketplace is not full of products it produces. The houses Zillow profits from are not owned by the company. Not even Ticketmaster does — and among the most hated brands in this country, Ticketmaster has its work cut out for it: It doesn’t produce the shows it sells so much as stand between artists and fans to skim billions off their connection.
The script is the same: middlemen get their take of every transaction without needing to bear production’s costs. They’re the toll booths of the digital era — making money not for creating value, but for enabling others to create and exchange value.
What makes this moment different is how invisible these companies are. Platforms are the facilities of everyday existence. You don’t think of them as intermediaries all that often. They’re what you think of as “how things work.” You need a ride? Open the app. You want groceries? Order through a service. Booking a trip? Swipe through websites that deal in selling you someone else’s place to live. Finding a freelancer? Matchmaking platforms take a percentage. Even courtship itself has been platformized — love becomes a transaction that takes place with the assistance of middlemen.
That’s why these companies are succeeding. They wormed their way into the most fundamental human activities: moving, eating, buying and selling, traveling, talking to one another, dating, working — even getting entertained. They control the routes. They control the flow. They control the access. In a world cluttered with options, the companies that reduce friction — even if they don’t make the key product — get to keep the cash.
The ease, for consumers, is hard to ignore. The issue is what happens next. Middlemen start by promising efficiency. Then they become gatekeepers. Fees rise. Terms change. Small businesses grow dependent on the platforms that link them to customers. Survival for restaurants now depends on delivery apps. Tenants comprise landlords’ business on listing platforms. Artists rely on ticket sellers. Drivers rely on ride-share algorithms. And when everyone else plugs in, middleman becomes landlord of the marketplace.
That imbalance molds the economy in uncomfortable ways. Producers are earning less than they once did. Workers lose bargaining power. The hunk carved out of the platform just gets larger. And in the end, consumers pay more — not because the product is more expensive to produce but because middleman tax is baked into everything.
It’s easy to see the strain locally on small businesses. Restaurants work on razor-thin margins, then relinquish 20 to 30 percent to delivery apps in order just to remain visible. Small retailers are stripped of control over pricing as marketplace algorithms determine who gets seen and who vanishes. Even homeowners who rent out only a spare room are charged steep platform fees for the privilege of hosting someone.
The middleman was supposed to be eliminated by technology. Instead it put up smarter, more robust ones that are increasingly fortified.
The supreme irony is that these companies cast themselves as empowering the little guy. They say they generate standing for others, not profit. And even though they provide a reach and scale nobody could have dreamed of two decades ago, it is getting more expensive to get that access. They feel it in their pocketbooks. Businesses are feeling it in their margins. It is something that workers feel in how algorithms control their pay.
Middlemen aren’t going away. In fact, they’re expanding. AI marketplaces, creator platforms, cloud providers, ad networks, fintech connectors — they all serve as middlemen that take percentages, harvest information and build empires atop aggregated transactions of others. The next group of billion-dollar companies won’t be selling products. They will direct the computer-controlled flow of what everything but them have made.
The reality is very simple: in modern economy, ownership counts for much less than access. And sitting in the most lucrative seat in the house, directly between everything happening on both sides of them: access providers.
For now, most people have been willing to stomach it because the trade-off seems worth it. Yet the imbalance has only gotten larger, and at some point it’s hard to avoid asking: How much power should middlemen actually have to shape the economy when they don’t produce any of the things we’re paying for?
Until that question is answered, the toll booths will continue to proliferate — and they’ll keep collecting.
