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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's entirely wrong when you have a heavyweight like the US/Hollywood that dominates the global entertainment industry. I don't know about you but the content coming out of Hollywood is depressingly dumb. This may be a hamfisted attempt at addressing that but the problem remains. The loudest voice in the room is US/Hollywood. Entertainment is often our "first contact" with ideas beyond our normal areas of expertise and if you entrust that to Hollywood, you're going to have a lot of misinformed people. I mean just look at how computer scientists and engineers are portrayed in Hollywood... if I had my choice I wouldn't want Hollywood portraying/writing about me and my peers.

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What is going to happen is reverse of what you say you want. The big Hollywood blockbusters will be just as available as before, what you are losing is the long tail of smaller independent films that may be more thought provoking or diverse.

If some streaming service has to cut 80% of its offerings, they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.

Even if they made more specific regulation to remove those blockbusters, which will annoy the general population, almost all regulation benefits the large incumbents in the long run. They have the resources to figure out how to game the system.

>what you are losing is the long tail of smaller independent films that may be more thought provoking or diverse.

>they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.

Most of the bigger franchises have already become "thought provoking" and "diverse" propaganda

EU is slowly cutting away sovereignity of its member states with regulations such as these. This is a very touchy subject for some of the european nations and "Hollywood production is dumb" is just an extremely stupid thing to bicker over at an international level. All it does is increasing political tension until another brexit happens.

Sovereignty? By allowing the US to be the major cultural influence? Really?

You are missing the point. Each member nation should decide by itself about how open to outside cultural influences it is.

The advantage that the EU has in this situation is that it's better able to "negotiate" as a bloc of 450M people, than (to use the upstream example) eg. Malta, with 440,000 people.

If individual countries want to require a local content quota, Netflix/Amazon/etc will simply cut them off. When it's a massive market, that's vastly less likely.

Giving individual countries an opt-out from the EU-wide rules just provides an opportunity to divide and conquer.

Australia has similar content quotas for broadcast television, but hasn't tried to apply them to streaming services yet. Of course, for 25M people, our leverage is substantially less.

Here we see a naked call for content-based suppression of speech, so that the EU government can shape how its citizens think.

> I'm not sure it's entirely wrong when you have a heavyweight like the US/Hollywood that dominates the global entertainment industry.

And it's getting worse.

Hollywood is "pre-sanitizing" its movies for China because of the increasing revenue there from secondary release.

But will you leave others the choice to watch what they want?

Yes. I think the local content should be available and accessible. But beyond that, it's up to the studios to fight for viewers.

Who is paying for the content? If you're promoting some content its at the expense of another set of content.

>>> I'm not sure it's entirely wrong

>> But will you leave others the choice to watch what they want?

> Yes

Can't at one point say it's not wrong to restrict content and at another point say you support people watching any content they want. Either you're for laws on amount of content or you accept that there is no ceiling/limits which includes what you subjectively perceive as dumb.

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