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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

With the purchase of most of Fox (pending approval), Disney will own basically every franchise you can name. If there ever were a media company that needed to be broken up, it would be Disney.

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It's definitely starting to look like Disney should be broken up, I just hope that they can acquire Fox first so they can keep each franchise together afterwards (e.g. all Star Wars properties owned by one entity, all Marvel properties owned by one entity, etc.)

Oh, for Pete's sake. Breaking up utility or transportation companies is one thing, but this is an entertainment company - not a provider of essential societal infrastructure. And there are still plenty of other companies making movies and comics and TV shows, including other very large ones; Warner Bros, for one, and NBC/Universal, for another. Disney/ABC/Fox has nowhere near a monopoly.

Nowhere in antitrust law do the arbitrary distinctions you’re trying to make exist.

"Is the entity in question actually a trust/monopoly-holder" is certainly a distinction I would hope exists in law.

Agreed, but that is a very different point from the one I responded to.

So you were arguing that an entertainment company is a provider of essential societal infrastructure? I just…

Even if true, Disney is still nothing near a monopoly, so this whole subthread is just silly.

No, I’m arguing that they’re monopolistic, grossly anti-competitive, and that the essential or non-essential nature of their services is another issue.

Saying that Disney is monopolistic in entertainment is like saying Ford is monopolistic in cars. Yes, they're a big player, but as I said several posts ago, there are many, many other companies you can choose from if you so wish.

When Ford changes copyright law to protect their assets, I’ll worry about their market dominance.

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