[hrktb]

I've been thinking about it, and perhaps the conclusion could be that the moment you start loaning, you are by definition in a special situation. I guess in the wider sense of the term it is still a market, but it doesn't behave like how we use to think about markets.

With your exemple about cars for instance, if every car maker decided to refuse to sell their cars, and only accepted loaning them, they'd have a lot more control than they have now, as long as they collude to all go loaning only.

They could block reselling, forbid you by contrat from using your car for specific uses (or you'd need an extra fee for professional use for instance), they could get rid of all the second hand market and force old cars to retire prematurely. You are right that we'd fall exactly in the situation we discussed with Netflix.

The main issue is not digital property or not, it's basically that we have a model where there is no tranfer of property, and the producer only lends to the consumer instead of outright selling. As it was said in another comment, Netflix could own the physical DVD while now they only rent the digital copies.