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Comment by gonvaled | Hacker News Reader

Extremely good news: left unchecked, the "market" would let minority communities behind.

the market just matches providers with consumers. Netflix and other providers respond to demand - if they aren't showing the content you want, it's likely that (given any reasonable level of demand) someone else will be. Forcing providers to produce content with less demand is purely ideological because if the demand were high, they would already be producing content to match it. Which they do. What the EU is trying to do is coercively transfer wealth from Netflix to their member states, which I consider to be unethical.

Not even close to the truth. What you are describing is a perfect functioning market, with producers just interested in serving the needs of the customers. In reality, things are way more complex:

- producers try to reduce costs

- producers ignore customer demands as long as they are able to do it. In particular when the customer has no option because competitors are following the same cost-saving approach.

- customers give up and start watching second-best options, and get used to them (tragedy of the commons)

- there are synergy effects which allow producers to get away with sub optimal options: I will use my Amazon Prime account to watch videos, even if I am not entirely happy with the offer, because I am already paying for Prime for delivery.

- the world is complicated, and consumers have little time and power, while producers can spend time writing 30 pages contracts. The only way to balance power here is to associate, but citizens are quite bad at it. The EU is an association, and I am happy that they are taking into account the consumer's interests.

I wonder when will this fallacy of "the market works to fulfill the interests of the customers" die out ...

All of these things are true, but that still doesn't make what the EU is doing, good. They're just forcing the providers to spend money in Europe. What makes you think European productions won't fall prey to exactly the same problems?

This is purely an exercise in the EU seeing that it can control foreign companies using GDPR and thinking "hey, why don't we use this to force companies to give us money".

Also:

> I wonder when will this fallacy of "the market works to fulfill the interests of the customers" die out ...

Just because it's flawed, doesn't mean it isn't mostly true. The market is far from perfect but that doesn't mean it doesn't still fulfil customer needs. It just doesn't fulfil all of them, fulfils them in an inoptimal way, and so on.

> if the demand were high

Culture is not just about satisfying demands, it's also about giving people the opportunity to stumble across things they weren't even looking for, and so enrich themselves in unexpected ways. As a teenager I had no particular desire to go looking for ancient harpsichord music, difficult jazz, sombre poetry, magnificent choral worship or even five-minute recordings of nothing but church bells ringing. But I found them just by twisting the radio dial late at night and discovering things that would never get airtime in a purely commercial setting. The fact that these things are paid for by a "tax" that many are still strongly opposed to, is something I would strongly support in a more modern media context.

You have just made the opposite point you wanted to: by requiring 30% local culture you have prevented someone from stumbling across a different non-local culture, simply because the math cannot work out without censoring something else.

Nice utopia you are describing. The reality is that without rules, neither the 30% local culture nor the non-local culture gets offered.

why would you expect Netflix to provide culture? Culture and commercialisation don't mix. Go find an independent organisation that is geared towards lifting up cultural works - trying to force commercial entities to publish obscure art by law is going to harm both the quality of the commerce and the quality of the art. Most people don't want to tune into Netflix to experience five minutes of church bells.

Yes that is all well and good, until that "content" and its message also starts being dictated by whomever is in charge of the government.

All of these things always sound like a great idea when you have good people in government. However almost everyone seem to forget that bad people do get into government too.

Having governments dictate or force quotas and determining content always ends up biting the people in the long run.

Not just minorities, but also anything that might enrich or challenge the mind in any significant way. BBC Radio 3 [0] would not exist in a free market, only dumbed-down 'pop classics' stations. The world would be significantly more stupid as a result.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radio_3

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