I want to talk about something I want to call an "economic bottleneck".

This is a spot where a small number of actors refusing to do business with you can prevent (or severely limit) you from reaching your market.

Fifteen or so years ago, there was a perfect example of an economic bottleneck. If you were a musician, and Walmart refused to sell your CDs, you were cut off from major parts of your market.

Perhaps today, Apple could be a similar bottleneck.

Payment services are a bottleneck. If you can't accept funds because MasterCard and Visa won't work with you, it's gonna be very hard to do business.

Applying pressure at a bottleneck can really make life hard for your targets. If you can get them blocked from making certain essential transactions, you can destroy their business.

Yes, there's bitcoin, but your product has to be roughly as appealing as heroin for people to go through the work of buying it that way, except for a handful of people who are more interested in bitcoin than whatever your product is.

App stores are another bottleneck. As is the Google search engine, or having a page on Facebook.

Cutting someone off at these bottlenecks has a much stronger effect than most places where you might attack them.

It will be interesting to see what happens in states with legal marijuana. In most, you still have to get your pot at special shops, not at the local Walgreen's.

Perhaps we will see this bottleneck open up as marijuana becomes legal in more states.

Apples iTunes app store is probably the tightest bottleneck. If Apple kicks you out, there's no way to get on people's phones, even if they want to.

Android/Play store is less tight, because apps can be side loaded. Alternative app stores can be made this way.

If progressive web apps get good enough, it may blow this bottleneck wide open.

Payment processing is probably high on the list of tight bottlenecks. With only a handful of processors, you can barely do business if they don't like you.

Cash, checks and bitcoin are available, but you lose a lot of business if you can't swipe plastic.

Large middleman retailers can serve as a bottleneck. If Walmart won't sell your product, that's gonna hurt a lot.

Much easier to work around that though. Worst case, you can rent space for your own stores.

Government regulation is the ultimate bottleneck, of course.

Black markets and "cat milk" style dodges show ways to get around that.

I suspect there's a bottleneck around hosting high-traffic web sites. These generally require CDNs or colocation, and those services are provided by only a few companies.

If Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Cloudflare won't host you, you'll be in a sorry state.

And if you're disliked enough that none of those companies will take your money, you'll probably need DDOS protection and other high cost network services, otherwise you'll get knocked off the internet by hacktivists.

A certain degree of inoffensiveness seems to be required in order to actually do business. If the concerned citizens brigade is large enough to choke you off at a bottleneck, it doesn't matter how many customers you would have had. You're SOL.