Someone has to coordinate the peer review process - that is, vet the trash, enforce standards, locate qualified reviewers and coordinate their feedback into digestible form. Now, in my opinion 95% of this is automatable and the other 5% probably costs about $50 per manuscript, so the current fees are certainly outrageous. However I don't think we will be doing ourselves a service to say that publishers do nothing at all. They just don't do anything comparable the value that they extract.