Ah, sorry, I thought the comment I was replying to was questioning the need for someone to provide prestige at all, as opposed to being focused on the concept of selling that prestige.
In general I don't have a problem with the idea of selling curation/prestige in the form of products and services, so I don't think it's a ridiculous thought (either for 2015 or any other time in history). Let's take another example, say publishing a novel. That's something that has also never been easier to do in a wide variety of ways. But self publishing a novel isn't (typically) enough to become a successful author. You need to somehow get your book to stand out as being better than the million other novels that people publish every year. So if someone can offer you a stamp of approval that the general public trusts, that gives people a reason to believe your book is worth their time more than other books, that's a valuable service. And I have no problem with the idea that whoever can offer that service should be able to charge for it.
I think the ridiculous thing in 2015 is that academic prestige is still almost exclusively tied to the name of the journal in which it is published. That I still have a hard time wrapping my head around sometimes. So I imagine that that will eventually change, but I'm not convinced that the process of separating the good from the bad and bestowing that prestige will inevitably be free.
So if someone can offer you a stamp of approval that the general public trusts, that gives people a reason to believe your book is worth their time more than other books, that's a valuable service
But a big book publisher doesn't just do this for an author. The author gets to leverage the publishers advertising/marketing budget and connections.
