Distribution companies made sense prior to the advent of the internet. But you can host journals over bittorrent easily, and if they were legal journals, there'

Distribution companies made sense prior to the advent of the internet. But you can host journals over bittorrent easily, and if they were legal journals, there'd be no reason for people to stop seeding, since there's no penalty to do so. I think your post has a bit of confusion, because as far as I know, the platforms themselves are not doing the peer review, they're just hosting the content. The big complaint about these platforms is that the institutions that send out the papers to these platforms do so completely independent of the authors. The platforms do not fund the authors, the institutions do, and for whatever reason, the institutions continue to deal with the platforms. The platforms themselves are quickly becoming irrelevant. Hosting costs are dropping radically, and the curation methods used by the platforms are very out-dated and more focused on anti-piracy techniques instead of making the information they're hosting accessible. The only reason they're staying relevant is due to the requirement that institutions publish to them, it's not as a result of actual service provided. The current platforms are a legacy item and they are inhibiting research. Like a lot of old legacy services, at a time they made sense, but more and more they don't.