It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.
However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.
The World
Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most.
At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.
Whether publishers give away their papers openly can make or break their business.
Where researchers publish in open or closed journals can make or break their careers.
Which journals libraries subscribe to can make or break their .. librarian's careers? Hopefully this link in the chain gets broken by Sci-Hub.
As an analogy, people who pay protection money or bribes are still part of the corruption and the mafia or corrupt politicians couldn't function without their support.