There is this thing in France called "l'exception culturelle" which means not that culture is exceptional, but that cultural products (books and movies essentially) should be exempt from normal (international) competition rules that apply to all other sectors of the economy.
The rationale is that cultural products are "special" and that if they're not protected, they'll vanish and be replaced by American ones that are inferior by nature.
In general terms, the bad consequences of protectionism are twofold:
1. It raises prices for the customer by limiting competition
2. It limits exports, as international partners try to do to your products what you do to theirs (keeping them out of their market)
French cultural products are notoriously difficult to export, for a variety of reasons, one of which being language and another being they're generally of poor quality (I say this as a Frenchman), so problem 2 isn't seen as major (you can't harm exports that you don't have).
And problem 1 isn't big either because everyone benefits from high prices which allow high taxes that further finance the cinema, and no one cares about the end user.
Personally I think this is a bad system that is in large part responsible for the poor quality mentioned above.
That said, rules should apply to all. Just because those rules are bad doesn't mean Netflix or Amazon should be exempt from them. We should change the rules -- but that's, like, hard.