| Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it. That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable". Typically, there are ways to do this. One way is forcing a company's distribution and streaming to be separate, and this already exists in some other parts of the market. So if Disney sells Mickey Mouse content $x to its own streaming service for $5, they have to do the same for Netflix. Disney can still set the price. It just has to pay it as well, and that reflects on its own balance sheet. The problems involved in regulating this have already been solved in other markets, it's a solved issue. Now, you can typically enter volume sales agreements still. So Disney streaming can buy 100k 'streaming options' for $4 if they hit the volume. But that means the same agreement has to be available to, say Netflix. Of course, the same will be true for any Netflix created content! Nothing is perfect, but this is the sort of common carry stuff that separates out 'cable companies' from 'TV studios', and there's been loads of legislation about this over the years. |
Or perhaps creation and display/distribution cannot be done by the same entity / conglomerate.