Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sabinus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there would be a case for anti-monopoly action against Disney et al, if the US was into doing that kind of thing. If media libraries were split up they wouldn't be able to charge as much for the whole package. It would allow more nuanced negotiations between distributors and the studios.

View on HN

But that's what's happened, and the result is FAR worse.

Instead of everything being on one app, now it feels like you "need" about 9 different services.

You can't. Because first they don't have monopoly on anything. Making the argument that only Disney can make Star Wars would be like arguing that only Tom Hanks can be Tom Hanks.

Second, even if you could prove they are a monopoly 'to big' you would still need to prove that there is actual harm to consumers. If the Disney streaming service is reasonably priced its not clear how you would prove that.

What would really make far more sense is simply to reduce Copyright laws back to former levels so that things get to be public domain.

Monopoly is a high bar to reach and antitrust cases don't always have to reach that bar to be viable. There's historically a lot of discretionary space in antitrust law just based on the political climate of the time, which generally deals with the calculus of determining if there is harm to consumers.

It's typical for harm to be argued along just one metric, prices for any particular individual, but I tend to think that's a mistake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com