Milestone Comics was founded in 1993 by a coalition of African-American artists and writers (namely Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis and Derek T. Dingle) who believed that minorities were severely underrepresented in American comics, and wished to attempt to correct this imbalance. Christopher Priest participated in the early planning stages of Milestone Media, and was originally slated to become the editor-in-chief of the new company, but bowed out for personal reasons before any of Milestone's titles were published, scaling down his involvement to become a liaison between DC and Milestone.
Although Milestone comics were published through DC Comics, they did not take place in the DC Universe. Under an arrangement similar to the one DC and Wildstorm established later, all Milestone characters existed in a separate continuity that did not fall under DC Comics' direct editorial control (but DC still retained right of refusal to publish). Unlike Wildstorm though, whose properties were bought by DC Comics, Milestone Media retained the copyright of their properties.
Fundamental to Milestone’s agreement with DC was they would not relinquish any of the legal or creative rights to their work. Throughout the negotiations, Milestone insisted on three basic points:
A) that they would retain total creative control
B) that they would retain all copyrights for characters under the Milestone banner
C) that they would have the final say on all merchandising and licensing deals pertaining to their properties.
In essence, DC licensed the characters, editorial services, and creative content of the Milestone books, in exchange for an annual fee and a share of the profits. Dwayne McDuffie said that DC held up this agreement even though some of Milestone's storylines made them "very uncomfortable" as they were from perspectives that DC weren't used to. The biggest conflict they had was when an issue of Static showed the hero kissing his girlfriend, which DC didn't want to publish on grounds that it was using sex to sell comics (which many DC covers at the time did); Milestone covered most of the image as a compromise, and McDuffie believed it made DC uncomfortable because it was specifically "black sexuality".
So, what would have happened if Milestone Comics had failed to meet a satisfactory agreement with DC Comics, and had thus either remained independent or sought an agreement/merger with someone else (Image Comics, for instance)? How would the Dakotaverse and its inhabitants be developed? And how successful could they be ITTL?