Last week two investors, Will Manidis and Joe Roberts, published The Commanding Heights, a 145-page essay about where the money from AI will end up. Their answer is that it won’t stay with the companies that build the models, because models get cheaper every few months. It will go to whoever owns the places AI has to pass through to reach people, which they call crossings. Whoever owns a crossing collects a toll, a cut of everything that moves through it. They are careful about which crossings count. A real one is scarce, its owner controls it, and it lasts. Their last test, and the one I keep coming back to, is whether anyone else can lay claim to the toll.
I wanted to see what happens when you run that test on media, using their own terms. The answers don’t line up, and that’s the interesting part. A claim on the toll can cut one owner’s take, the way a court cut Apple’s App Store commission, and help another collect one, the way Universal’s lawsuit against Udio ended in a settlement and new licenses. Sometimes competition settles the question before anyone has to object. And the crossing I find most interesting in media is one the test can’t score yet, which the essay doesn’t mention.
Distribution
Start with the obvious candidate. The app stores, the streaming platforms and the social feeds sit between almost every piece of media and the person who wants it. They are scarce, since only a handful matter. Their owners control them. And they have lasted, with the same few companies in place for more than a decade.
Then look at what happened to Apple’s toll on Spotify. For years apps on the iPhone couldn’t even tell users they could pay somewhere else. In April 2025, in the case Epic Games brought against Apple, a federal judge found Apple in willful violation of an earlier order and barred its 27 percent commission on purchases made outside the app. Two days later Spotify’s iPhone app started sending American users to outside payment. The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding last December and sent the question of a fair commission back to the trial court. Apple took the case to the Supreme Court, which agreed in June to hear the contempt question and on Monday set argument for January 11. Apple still owns the store. What changed is what it is allowed to charge, and the change came from a rival’s lawsuit and a judge’s order, with Spotify walking through the opening.
Delivery and compute
The pipes that move media look like the purest version of their argument. Encoding, packaging, content delivery and now inference are expensive, technical and everywhere.
This is where I started. I worked at Inlet, which built some of the early HLS encoders MLB used, and that layer has been rebuilt several times since by people who charged less. The essay makes the same point about AI’s own supply chain, where margins jump from power to transmission to chips as each bottleneck gets solved. One encoder business doesn’t settle the economics of content delivery or inference. It does show how a supplier can be necessary in one decade and replaceable in the next, which is the authors’ durability test doing its job before anyone had to press a claim.
Catalogs
Catalogs and IP libraries are scarce in a way pipes aren’t. Nobody can build another Motown library. The owner controls it, and the good ones have earned money for decades.
Here the owner pressed the claim itself. Universal Music Group sued the song generator Udio for copyright infringement, and in October 2025 the two announced a compensatory settlement along with new licenses for recorded music and publishing, and agreed to build a licensed platform together. The companies didn’t disclose the license terms, and what they’re worth will depend on what courts and contracts end up saying training requires. Put the two cases side by side and Apple and Universal land on opposite sides of the same test. A claim from outside cut into Apple’s toll, and Universal’s own claim helped it collect one.
The record
The fourth crossing is the one the essay doesn’t describe. It is the record of who made a piece of media, who appears in it, what they agreed to and what it is allowed to become. That’s where rights, consent and provenance live.
I’d be overstating it to say that record already sits there waiting. In One Use at a Time I used a request for twelve seconds of footage to show how archive clearance works. Someone has to identify the performers, find the agreements that apply and work out reuse fees, and that research only begins once the use is named. In a lot of media the record gets assembled on demand, one request at a time.
That makes it a candidate the test can’t score yet. If keeping the record well gets harder to route around as claims multiply, it would strengthen with use the way the authors say a real Height should. More claims could as easily mean more research for the buyer on every clearance, with no keeper any stronger on the hundredth than on the first. The formats for carrying provenance, like C2PA, are open standards, so nobody gets to own the format itself. I don’t think the evidence settles which way this goes.
Where that leaves the map
The authors are right that a crossing has to survive other people’s claims on its toll. What media shows is that those claims don’t all push in the same direction. One cut a platform’s commission. One ended in a settlement and new licenses. In delivery, the market got there before any claim had to. A useful map of media’s crossings has to say which of those is happening where, and for the record it can’t say yet. Sunday’s Deep Cut picks up there. Every claim in this piece came from a company, Epic against Apple and Universal against Udio. In media, many of the people with a stake in a crossing are the actors, writers, musicians and photographers whose work moves through it, and some of them have bargained their way into its terms. Sunday looks at what their objections can change even when they can’t stop a deal, and at who is still left without one.
Sources
Will Manidis and Joe Roberts, The Commanding Heights, October 29, 2026.
Music Business Worldwide, “Apple approves Spotify’s app update in the US after Epic Games court ruling,” May 6, 2025.
MacRumors, “Apple Fights Back Against Epic’s Bid to Kill Supreme Court Appeal,” June 11, 2026.
Supreme Court of the United States, Docket No. 25-1311, petition granted June 30, 2026, set for argument January 11, 2027.
Music Business Worldwide, “Universal Music settles Udio lawsuit, strikes deal for licensed AI music platform,” October 30, 2025.
Andy Beach, “One Use at a Time,” Engines of Change.