More than two decades of scholarship on global value chains (GVCs) has reshaped our understanding of the global economy while tracking the international fragmentation of productive process and its socioeconomic consequences. In this paper we focus on the effort by lead firms to capture market power in the provision of and production of intangible assets. The analysis builds on Pagano's (2014) notion of "intellectual monopoly", where government protections of intellectual property have the effect of locking in the monopoly power from intangible asset creation. We extend it to the presence of scale economies and network externalities associated with the production of intangible assets.