FWIW, this is the main side of the EU that I'm aware of: laughably bad lawmaking, based on complete unawareness of (or apathy towards?) the concept that the consequences of policies aren't based on wishing on a star that they be a certain way.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not sure I'd rather live (as I do) under the US's policy regime than I would under the EU's. But our pathologies of governance are different ones.

You know how the saying goes, you can live under US domestic policy or US foreign policy, but you can’t escape US policy. The idea of the EU was that by working together the member states could get their way in the face of that US foreign policy more often than they would on their own. In the absence of a strong EU, the US and China are pretty much unrestrained in Europe.

If some streaming service has to cut 80% of its offerings, they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.

Even if they made more specific regulation to remove those blockbusters, which will annoy the general population, almost all regulation benefits the large incumbents in the long run. They have the resources to figure out how to game the system.

>they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.

Most of the bigger franchises have already become "thought provoking" and "diverse" propaganda

If individual countries want to require a local content quota, Netflix/Amazon/etc will simply cut them off. When it's a massive market, that's vastly less likely.

Giving individual countries an opt-out from the EU-wide rules just provides an opportunity to divide and conquer.

Australia has similar content quotas for broadcast television, but hasn't tried to apply them to streaming services yet. Of course, for 25M people, our leverage is substantially less.

And it's getting worse.

Hollywood is "pre-sanitizing" its movies for China because of the increasing revenue there from secondary release.

>> But will you leave others the choice to watch what they want?

> Yes

Can't at one point say it's not wrong to restrict content and at another point say you support people watching any content they want. Either you're for laws on amount of content or you accept that there is no ceiling/limits which includes what you subjectively perceive as dumb.

It seems that fear is making them adopt such a defensive approach that it is stopping them to see how their efforts are actually sucessively destroying any remnant of representativeness they might still have.

If this trend (which started with the financial crisis in 2008/9) continues, the EU might end up being France and Germany alone in a few decades.

Of course, it probably helps that Canada has plenty of cultural and linguistic similarities to the United States. Preserving the native culture of, say, Denmark through Danish Content regulations on popular entertainment means producing content that isn't easily consumed outside of Denmark, whereas a ton of Canadian Content can be easily marketed in the United States.

Not that I agree with it...

If one appears to beget the other they might as well be the same. I sympathize with countries desiring sovereignty on these issues that should remain at the country level.

But more specifically, what I was arguing is that these kinds of decisions are not why people want to leave (sannee's point above). People want to leave due to poor people not having had adequate political representation for a long time, thus begetting populism when the financial crisis hit us. Not because of TV rules being agreed with other countries (sorry for the strawman, but it makes the point).

I'm not sure that's true. I think the EU, as a non-political economic union gives you that cake. It's the political side keeping you from eating it. I think there are many financial policies that can be properly disentangled from political beliefs and the ones that can't should be deferred.

TV rules are a microcosm of the real issue: a political union making political decisions when some of its less influential members would prefer such not-purely-economical decisions be delegated. (at least this is what it looks like from the outside)

The EU as a single market has great potential. But that needs uniform and standardized access, which is politics.

And no, it wouldn't work without the political overlay (or foundations), because member states are already each in a non pure market state, and it would take a very long time for those politically disjoint markets to standarize and uniformize.

And there is power in numbers. The EU is relevant. England will soon find out how irrelevant it is alone.

It's not absolute and binary, and the inability to recognize that and delegate on issues which are more political than financial is what causes issues. Passing laws on streaming providers in England based on French ideals of cultural protection is exactly the issue. This should remain a nation-level issue yet the legislators would way rather use the leverage of the super-nation since they can as opposed to whether they should.

> The EU as a single market has great potential. But that needs uniform and standardized access, which is politics.

It doesn't need 100% uniform and standardized access. There are limits to standardization. If they really wanted to be uniform, they'd do so in the language, but clearly the goal is not absolute uniformity. It is uniformity within reason and delegate to nations for other aspects (such as language). It's what is chosen to be delegated that is the issue.

> And there is power in numbers. The EU is relevant. England will soon find out how irrelevant it is alone.

Meh, as relevant as before and many other nations. Self determinism is where real power lies as it is obvious that one's own house should be clean before projecting. The EU can increase its influence and delegate its cultural rulemaking at the same time but it seems that the approach of individual governments, such as those that believe culture should be enforced via legal restrictions, reign.

I think I could handle that.

Fair point. Though the future might not be so rosy. But in an unfortunate timeline those countries are likely to quickly align with some others anyway.

However, deals made in peace are usually better.

Yet they have the fundamentals to be at least at Australian and Canadian levels of prosperity.

Too many politicians in the UK are trying to ensure the economy tanks when the UK leaves the EU.

This appears to be an outgrowth of that.

There's economies of scale to producing products addressed to the majority, and minorities suffer as a result. This doesn't just affect cultural products. Who wants the high street in their town to be filled with chain shops, identikit and no different from the next town over?

No, totally not.

Promoting national and regional content is probably something that the populist anti-EU types would support anyhow.

I understand the EU has woes, and some rulings might cause problems ... but this ruling isn't an example of that.

Sure, I would not be surprised if this concrete instance of such a regulation was welcomed in these circles (consistency isn't strong suite of some), but the more broad point stands.