Let's go the other way! Any of these corporate entities that control am entire vertical were produced by the centralizing logic of the US economy and legal landscape. Boeing is but the USG's plane manufacturing division, masquerading as a public company. Live Nation is the defacto ticketing provider. As government (created, controlled) entities, it's entirely reasonable to me to call this a tax.
Boeing is not the only airplane manufacturer in US. If you look how it operates, it runs the government’s civil aviation, not the other way around. FAA has basically trusted Boeing to self-certify everything. It looks like without government interventions the only outcome is total monopolization.
It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.
It's a cheap example, banks might have been better what with the obviously costly AML/KYC and bookkeeping requirements (not that these are bad, merely that they tend to centralize and concentrate actors so the fixed costs can be amortized more efficiently over a greater number of clients).
Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.
More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
> They’re just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
The term for that is “monopoly rent”, it is a subtype of economic rents (which are distinct from, but overlap, “rents” of goods or services for a finite time as distinct from sales.)
Actions taken in pursuit of economic rents are called “rent-seeking”.
Rent-seeking is profiting from position without adding value.
Rent-seeking is not merely pricing your product as high as the market will bear.
Ticketmaster adds value. They just charge exorbitant fees.
...
Edit: But OK, you can argue that their full vertical integration (ticketing-venue-artist management) is maximizing their position for the furtherance of increasing their fees, and that would be rent-seeking. I don't see it that way, but I won't argue against interpreting them as a coercive monopolist, which is close enough.
How's that working out for the realtor's association these days with recent court decisions? I think those show that it's a bad idea as well. A nominal fee is one thing, but ticketmaster has been milking it for decades and continuously getting worse and worse about it.
Probably pretty well, IIUC they're "just" dropping from 6% to 4% for in many cases just opening a door. Hell, Ticketmaster is probably happy that Realtors can still maintain their listing monopoly.
I'm not going to claim Ticketmaster is charging a "honest" amount but I will claim it should be called a "fee" and not a "tax".
Fee or Commission works fine here. The line item for sellers/buyers agent isn't "tax" when you buy/sell a house despite it being a percentage.