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by wp381640 2375 days ago
The DOJ presser said the site was "larger" than Netflix, Hulu and Amazon combined in terms of available content - some media reports have misreported it as larger by subscriber count
3 comments

That goes without saying, content providers are shooting themselves in the foot with an atomic shotgun with the current fragmentation and lots of content is not legally available anywhere.
A tragedy of the commons among the content providers -- exclusive content is an edge that they can't resist individually, but damages them collectively.
I don't think "tragedy of the commons" is the appropriate term for what's going on here. These movies aren't a "commons", they're all privately owned by a bunch of different private entities. They used to license them to Netflix to be streamed, but now they've pulled back from that a lot so they can operate their own streaming services.

"Tragedy of the commons" is when a bunch of private interests use a publicly-owned resource in a greedy way and end up ruining it for everyone. I don't think this quite applies here, but I don't know of any other term to call it because I can't think of any non-internet analogies.

Thanks, that makes sense. The HN title should probably be corrected then, at mods' convenience.
Yeah the title is definitely misguided.