> Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.

This is part of the fleecing. It ends up in law the same way that "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" (NRSROs) ended up in law in the US, or anti-third party laws (like against "fusion.")

Those laws and regulations seem like great places to attack, seeing as against the vast majority of academics, the few juggernauts of academic publishing would be very much underdogs. The problem is the weird rationalization that these arbitrary brands serve a useful purpose simply through being labeled as brands that should be respected.

It's no wonder they do as little as possible and charge as much as possible. Their value lies not in the papers they publish, the quality of their peer reviews, or the composition of their boards (which could easily be transferred) but in their titles, as if they were royalty. The only way to transfer this value is to sell the name to a huge company that can realize economies of scale and monopoly power to bring costs down even farther.