Neither of these studios are based in Hollywood. In fact right now, both Coming To America 2 and Bad Boys 3 are filming at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta.

On top of that, if you want to make a movie today and get distribution, there are dozens of cable channels and streaming services who want exclusive content. You don’t need to be in theaters.

In fact, you can sell your movie to consumers via any of the on demand platforms like iTunes, Vudu, Google Play Movies or Amazon.

[1] I’m personally no fan of it, it’s low brow shucking and jiving, Stepin Fetchit content. And before I get downvoted to oblivion and flagged for being racist, I am Black.

I am not a fan either...

The amount of at home entertainment with HBO, Amazon Prime, CBS Streaming (for Star Trek), and Netflix is phenonimal. I am fine with paying for services and just experiencing a wide sampling. It does take some self control to be willing to stop watching series after sampling some episodes.

People might still go because the theater experience is convenient, even when the content produced by the studios is crap. Happens all the time.

Sure, there may be a more valuable film that was never made, but that doesn't negate the net positive.

As I said previously, there is nothing stopping anyone from distributing content via a multitude of channels.

I agree with you that the film industry itself doesn't currently have a monopoly or oligopoly problem, especially not internationally. But the fact that there are huge problems in related areas of digital content distribution and discovery (app stores, search, social networks, network operators specifically in the US) is cause for alarm in my view.

The problem is spreading rapidly and it wouldn't be a surprise if the film industry was one of the next victims.

Search - nothing is stopping anyone from going to other search engines. It’s not like Bing is backed by one or two people with no financial backing.

Social networking - the social networks pre- Facebook failed because people chose a better experience.

On none of those cases are corporations forcing people to do anything nor or any of them essential services for which there is no alternative.

And the “definition” does matter. Once people in power can make up their own definitions it leads to government overreach.

Currently, that seems unrealistic in some areas like app stores where you can see egregious misuse of dominant market positions.

It's ineffective in other areas like social networks because all new market entrants are swiftly taken over by incumbents without any resistance by regulators.

The definition of monopoly is important in some respects but not for the question of whether or not we can reap the benefits of markets or suffer the consequences of dysfunctional markets. It doesn't take a clearcut monopoly to render a market dysfunctional.

(I'm not sure which people in power you are talking about)

You act as if it isn’t the goal of every startup that takes VC funding to get acquired. Yeah going public is the other route, but statistically it hardly ever happens. Look no further than YC. Only two YC backed companies have ever gone public.

VCs wouldn’t invest in companies if they thought their only exit strategy was navigating via the very unlikely road of going public. If it were harder to sell a company to a larger tech company, most of these investments would never happen.

The definition of monopoly is important in some respects but not for the question of whether or not we can reap the benefits of markets or suffer the consequences of dysfunctional markets. It doesn't take a clearcut monopoly to render a market dysfunctional.

Facebook came in and took on MySpace with a better product - not government regulation.

I'm not sure which people in power you are talking about

The government. Everyone likes government power as long as their side is in charge.

Where is the competition to Facebook? Instagram and Whatsapp were compelling alternatives that achieved traction. The US government allowed Facebook to acquire them, reducing competition, and thus the incumbent's incentive to innovate.

Recently a new competitor achieved traction, with 500M users and over 1B downloads: TikTok. What's different about TikTok? It's from China, and the Chinese government won't let Facebook buy it. (Heck, they won't even let Facebook compete against it in its home market.)

So, American industry may lose much of the social media market to a Chinese competitor, because American regulators have been asleep on the job, and our incumbents are no longer responsive to changes in market demand.

This is how many US industries have become less competitive as a shrinking number of large firms have gobbled up their competitors.

By the way, your comments in this thread seem a bit uncharitable toward those of us who hold opposing views, we are not idiots. No one is advocating that there should be a law requiring firms to hold no more than 5% of the market. I argue that big firms in markets with oligopoly or monopoly characteristics shouldn't be allowed to acquire their competitors willy-nilly, which is in fact pretty much the antitrust law that's on the books today.

What are the chances that they wouldn’t have run out of money before being profitable? Their only realistic means of survival was being acquired. They need Facebook’s advertising infrastructure to be profitable. Who else would have acquired them Twitter? They were constantly crashing around then. Google? Apple? Microsoft?

What was to stop Facebook from crushing Instagram without acquiring them by building their best features - like they are doing with SnapChat?

I didn't mean to imply anything wrt that question. I don't think it matters. What matters is whether the market is actually working, and it's not. There's very little competition.

MySpace was ages ago and it never had the financial might of Facebook. So that's not a good example of an oligopoly resolving itself, but I grant you that there are such examples (IBM for one, also Microsoft although regulators may have influenced that one).

I'm actually rather skeptical when it comes to the effectiveness of competition regulation. But some of the things that are happening right now are simply unacceptable, regardless of whether or not they might eventually resolve themselves.

That 30% app store revenue cut is just ridiculous, as are lifetime bans from extremely dominant platforms without explanation or recourse.

>The government. Everyone likes government power as long as their side is in charge.

You said it was a problem if people in power were making up their own definitions, and you said it in response to a sloppy use of the term "monopoly" by an HN commenter. "HN commenter" doesn't quite meet my definition of "people in power".

Regulators had no affect on MS getting caught flat footed when it came to media players in the early 2000s which led to Apple being able to dominate the mobile phone market (in terms of profit) or Google in terms of volume.

Facebook didn’t have a ton of funding early on and MySpace was a giant. Apple was basically bankrupt in 1997 and was much smaller than Microsoft when it introduced the iPhone.

If Facebook does “monopolize” social media, it is both because people chose to congregate there and if Facebook doesn’t meet the need of people, they will go somewhere else, there is no need for government to tell people that too many of them are on one platform.

If people don’t have any other place to show off their idealized life and post cat memes, who cares? The last thing we need is more government power.

As far as the 30% revenue cut. The revenue cut for retail use to be 60%. Even during the j2ME era the revenue cut was 60% for the platform owner.

But let’s not pretend that the App Store overflowing with apps from hardworking artists. Most of the money is being made from whales buying in app consumables and if all of those apps disappeared the world would be a better place.

On the other hand, most of the major content producers are bypassing the App Store payments and forcing consumers to buy subscriptions and content outside of the App Store c

But I actually used Microsoft as an example for a situation that resolved itself largely without government intervention, because I don't think the threat of breakup was decisive for their failure to capture the mobile space (or the web).

It did take an awfully long time for Microsoft to lose its suffocating dominance though. Many entrepreneurs and inventors who tried to compete on merit were crushed by Microsoft or never got started. Lots of consumers paid far more than they would have if there hadn't been this near monopoly.

Facebook's funding early on is not the point. The point is that MySpace couldn't have used the strategy that Facebook is using today to rid itself of competition, because MySpace was a financial dwarf whereas Facebook is a financial giant.

>If Facebook does “monopolize” social media, it is both because people chose to congregate there and if Facebook doesn’t meet the need of people, they will go somewhere else...

Yes, and that other place will then be bought up by Facebook.

>The last thing we need is more government power.

I agree that we don't need more government power in general. But we do need governments to play the part that only governments can play and play it effectively. Markets sometimes become dysfunctional and governments need to fix that using the powers they already have.

It amazes me how many people trust corporations and want more corporate power.

What “power” do they have?

The difference between corporate power and government power is that a corporation can’t forcible take your money, property and liberty. I can choose whether to give my money to a corporation. I can’t choose whether to give my money to the government.

A corporation has a lot less “power” than the government. If a corporation makes a decision I don’t like, I don’t give them my money. I don’t have that choice with the government.

The flurry of movies loved by critics coincidentally working for media outlets owned by big players, and hated by actual fans shows the power of this.

Terminator: Dark Fate should have been amazing but it pretty much sucked, for example. Being out of sync with the fans doesn’t seem to matter to studio bosses, even if the movie tanks.