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How would you break up Disney’s monopoly?
- Thread starter Uzumaki Goku
- Start date
You know it's funny, I've actually worked (as a banker, not a lawyer) with the FTC in the consideration of what constitutes a monopoly, and no one ever seems to realize that they care a lot more about the labor markets than is ever mentioned in these topics...
I mean, if they're relevant here, longer discussion than I've time for, although Albatross covers a lot of why this is a silly thing to claim of Disney in any case, but just in general, I never, ever, ever see it brought up.
I mean, if they're relevant here, longer discussion than I've time for, although Albatross covers a lot of why this is a silly thing to claim of Disney in any case, but just in general, I never, ever, ever see it brought up.
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The Fox stuff is funny because the other option was merging with NBC/Universal... who you know is owned by an ISP/Telecom Giant... you know Comcast, one of America's most hated companies
Every creative work first published over 25 years ago enters the public domain. Let everyone try their hand at a Star Wars movie or a Spider-Man comic.
Shit AT&T quasi owns Warner Discovery
Disney and Paramount are the only major studios not owned by the worst kind of companies in the US
And who the fuck knows where Paramount is going to land
Disney and Paramount are the only major studios not owned by the worst kind of companies in the US
And who the fuck knows where Paramount is going to land
Disney's media properties:
Disney
Pixar
Marvel
LucasFilm
ESPN
Fox
That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more that I don't know of. These media properties are fucking huge, and reducing Disney to the company that makes super hero movies is actually ridiculous. There's not a child alive in the U.S. whose entire media landscape can't be summed up as "Disney plus some other stuff", and that's an incredible amount of influence to wield. That statement arguably holds for many adults too, and conflating the raw number of movies people see in theater's to their success/influence doesn't make any sense. Disney's influence is long lived, starts young, and extends beyond what they show in theaters.
that's not how it works.
you can argue that google has a monopoly on search, but that in itself isn't inherently a problem and isn't made better or worse by the alphabet structure. what matters is when you're deemed to abuse that monopoly power to gain an advantage in another area. that's why google has been hit by regulations in europe for its news and shopping products, for example.
there's no law i'm aware of that would prevent someone from becoming an incredibly dominant movie studio, and even if there was, disney wouldn't be close to getting there.
How many kids under 6, let's say, are watching Disney properties vs the output of Cocomelon? How much time do kids between 7 and 15 spend on Roblox vs Disney properties? At what point does TikTok start to come into the picture? How does that listing fare against Spongebob, Paw Patrol, or Peppa Pig for mindshare?
I mean, heck, you often hear that Pokemon is the biggest media franchise in the world. Now, I don't think that's true, but the fact that it's not just outright and unquestionably Disney counts for a lot. It's not just a case of listing out media properties, many of which we are familiar with, and assuming it simply must hold true en masse.
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Frankly, I can't speak to how young kids writ large are now dividing their time, but every small child I've come into contact with over, say, the last 5 years has absolutely been heavy on at least one thing owned by Disney. Maybe Disney's hold will wane over time, but anyone with some money to spend right now almost certainly has or had a lot of Disney stuff comprising their media diet. I see no reason to assume that the incredibly influential properties that Disney owns, properties that so far have enduring popularity over generations, are simply going to not appeal to a kid 5, 10 years from now, especially if Disney is proactive in marketing them to kids(which they almost certainly will be).
Like, I can understand if people come into this thread and feel calling them a monopoly is hyperbolic. It likely is, but I don't get at all people just brushing off Disney's consolidation of IP, studios, media in general like it isn't something to be concerned about. It's not a pressing as, say, tech consolidation, but treating this as a non-issue because it's about the media we consume isn't the answer either because that shit is important.
The last film I saw in theatres before the pandemic hit. 4.5./5People complaining about Marvel Disney
But no one supported this movie when it came out.
if people watched this we'll be getting Valiant EXTENDED UNIVERSE
The last film I
I do think that Disney has gotten way too big and have lost the plot. They paid a lot of money and now have a movie studio languishing under their leadership just to get some film rights back for Marvel IP.
They own a bunch of IP. Them owning a bunch of very popular very valuable IP does not stop other companies from producing content. Mental gymnastics are required to call this something worth breaking up because they don't own the theaters, internet providers, or cable services that they and their competition put their content out through. Monopolies aren't just about how much a company owns, but how much control they could influence on potential competition.
What is this thread.
What is this thread.
My issue with this argument is it is focusing on the wrong area for what the concern ultimately is. What is the ultimate concern here?
Is it the ability to influence a large number of children via popular IP? Does making sure they don't own Star Wars and Marvel at the same time solve that problem? If they were able to achieve that arbitrary metric of influence by just the Disney animated movies they created alone, should they have to sell off some of those until they were able to come under that metric again?
Is the concern that by having so much popular IP, they are able to exert too much influence on the entertainment market (or whatever market)? If so, again, does making them sell off Star Wars or Marvel really fix the problem? If they can theoretically achieve this success with IP they've created entirely in house, does it matter whether or not they achieve it by buying other IP? Especially when the popularity of IP can ebb and flow very easily?
My point is this: People always focus on the fact that Disney owns a lot of popular IP being the problem and so splitting those out being the solution, when really the problem is the lack of restrictions on how they are legally able to throw their weight around. Rather than focusing on taking away enough of Disney's IP that it doesn't reach an arbitrary popularity metric, doesn't it make more sense to focus on limiting the power and influence they can exert with that popularity?
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agreed Disney doesnt have a monopoly, last I checked there are planty of other companies making tv/movies. to awsner the question, I wouldnt becouse they arent one.
a quick search on google says they currently have a 4.4% market share...
https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=DIS
https://csimarket.com/stocks/competitionSEG2.php?code=DIS
A monopoly consists of holding the means of production or competition in an industry. Disney doesn't have that. They have a lot of successful IP, but there's no such thing as a monopoly of ideas. Nobody has to go to Disney, hat in hand, to beg to be allowed to use the equipment to make a movie or a TV show. Nobody has to beg Disney to get their movie or show on Disney+ because Disney+ is the only streaming service that exists. Nobody has to cajole Disney to allow them distribution into theaters because no other distributors exist or Disney owns all or the majority of the theaters in the country.
They're big, and they're successful, but that is not what a monopoly is. It's time to stop using "monopoly" to mean "big company I don't like."
They're big, and they're successful, but that is not what a monopoly is. It's time to stop using "monopoly" to mean "big company I don't like."
It just reads like a regurgitation of clickbaity youtube videos. The suggestions of how to break apart Disney in the OP just make no sense.
It doesn't really matter if it makes more sense or not, it's about what is or is not an achievable outcome. Of course the better answer is to simply have a system that is inherently resistant to the influence of large and popular company, but at that point you're getting into the realm of system change, which is basically a non-starter in the current day U.S. Divvying up Disney, a single company, is an easier and more specific step than attempting to make the changes necessary under capitalism to stop a size class of corporation from having too much influence over our media diets. As much as I would like to see a change like that, it's pure fantasy.
It is incredible to call the responses to this thread bad faith or obtuse when the OP is literally incorrect on top of one of the responses/clarifications and solutions being offered to this problem being "Give SW back to Lucas who sold it because he didn't want it to begin with"...
I'm certain there's a discussion to be had somewhere on the topic of Disney and its size/influence/market share, but this thread as titled and started was not the way to kick it off. You can't come in here growling at people for noticing that.
I'm certain there's a discussion to be had somewhere on the topic of Disney and its size/influence/market share, but this thread as titled and started was not the way to kick it off. You can't come in here growling at people for noticing that.
These are incredibly dumb suggestions.
These aren't countries or land taken by the slaughter of innocent people. These are media IP bought because someone wanted to sell them.
There is no nobility in giving them back to their original owners.
If Lucas wanted Star Wars he wouldn't have sold it
He was done with it and felt someone else could do a lot more it than he could. He was right, despite what you think of the sequel trilogy, Disney has done far more with the IP than Lucas ever would have.
These aren't countries or land taken by the slaughter of innocent people. These are media IP bought because someone wanted to sell them.
There is no nobility in giving them back to their original owners.
If Lucas wanted Star Wars he wouldn't have sold it
He was done with it and felt someone else could do a lot more it than he could. He was right, despite what you think of the sequel trilogy, Disney has done far more with the IP than Lucas ever would have.
Yeah I think Disney gets real focused on because all their stuff is in the entertainment sphere and it's way more visible because of that. Like it's a lot easier for a person to be all "oh they make all these movies, and have all these theme parks, and have a streaming service! That's too much" because those are all things people can see. It's a lot harder for people to grasp the implication of a studio being owned by a god damn ISP even if that's arguably worse
They need to be broken up because they're another rich corporation negatively influencing national and local politics by waving around millions of dollars, but no, they're not a monopoly. They just have overly aggressive copyright lawyers making it seem like they own all intellectual property.
Right, but you said they've a vice grip; that would indicate more than just a few things of interest in. I mean, I don't expect us all to have precise metrics for how kids divide time, but that's kinda the crux of the matter. Whether or not kids like one thing Disney does not mean they don't like one or more things from other properties, and I would posit that we're not super well positioned to recognize or remember as well media beyond the properties we've grown up with. No one is denying they're influential, but "breaking up" just because we suspect that a certain [randomly chosen] sample size of kids has a certain [randomly chosen and very challenging to measure] interest in certain IPs is pretty weakly argued.
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Doesn't it though? What seems more achievable and useful in this situation? Creating an arbitrary metric that determines a maximum level of popularity any one entity is allowed to achieve via IP owned, or creating rules around what any one entity is allowed to do with the power or influence they have (via IP or not)?
Disney had a monopoly on Disney characters too. I don't know why more people aren't talking about this.
Disney has had major influence on kids for 60+ years. Just there's now sci-fi and super heroes too instead of mostly fairy tales and animal Hamlet.
Kids still have plenty of other stuff from other places too that are big, many of them much more of a problem in their content and who runs those companies. So when it comes to think of the children, Disney isn't high on that particular concern scale.
Everything is consolidating, and it isn't by fault of Disney. They're only there picking up the pieces. Lucas didn't give up on Star Wars because of Disney. 20th Century Fox didn't fall apart because of Disney. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon's treatment of their creatives and properties isn't the fault of Disney.
There's aspects of copyright laws that need to be addressed. Disney and for-profit companies in general shouldn't be giving, or even be able to, donations to political parties. There should be systems in place for theaters to not be able to be strong armed into how they delegate screen availability. Those are the actual issues where Disney has some form of fault in, yet few opt to talk about them and instead focus in on that they have the rights to Marvel film properties and Star Wars.
Looking at an individual corporation and deciding if they meet an arbitrary metric to be actioned is way more achievable than a suite of new rules being applied to corporations writ large regarding how much influence they can wield.
When I said "Disney has a vice grip on pop media" I was not limiting my concern to that of children. They have a strong consolidation of a lot of important IP and media operations that gives them a broad amount of influence over entertainment in general. I think it's important to consider their influence over kids, but that isn't the focus of my concern. And I never argued that they should literally be broken up, only that their current size is somewhat worrisome is deserving of scrutiny.
Perhaps, but even outside of children, that would be tremendously hard to measure and I don't even think offhand it's especially true. I mean, we're on a video game forum; how big is Disney in video games? Not massively so, and that's a far larger market than movies. I don't see what's concerning at all, to be honest.
I still don't see what the big deal is even if they dominated pop media.
There are legitimate concerns about them being able to pressure theaters, sure. But if we're talking control of media, the control that news organizations like Sinclair or Fox have on the general public is a lot more alarming than anything Disney is doing by having huge kid and nerd IPs.