While I do have a strong soft spot for the dreamy leftist ideal of worker cooperatives (and I'm happy and impressed that an example as big and long-living as Mo

While I do have a strong soft spot for the dreamy leftist ideal of worker cooperatives (and I'm happy and impressed that an example as big and long-living as Mondragon exists), I've recently started to find the much less anticapitalistic concept of b2b buyer cooperatives far more interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DATEV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DATEV for example is doing just fine and feels as corporate as it gets (interviewed there once). What's so interesting about b2b cooperatives? Recently we have seen the rise of market/directory platforms in fields where the network effect is so strong that it's impossible to sustain real competition for long and once they are effectively monopolistic they can squeeze entire industries dry at will, degenerating into pure rent seeking. Poster child example: there cannot be a second booking.com, the closest they have to competition is airbnb. A buyer cooperative with the explicitly defined mission to just run the platform at low cost would be the perfect antidote and a massive improvement for everybody in the buying sector (those that purchase directory listings) and their customer base. It wouldn't even be an impediment to innovation because frontends could still be a multitude of conventional for-profits, they'd just not compete in listing breadth (they'd all get the same offers from the coop backend). Works roughly like that in the airline industries, despite multiple competing backends. The big difference: those backends are (were?) owned by airlines, not by outsiders trying to maximise value extraction.