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Comment by hobs | Hacker News Reader

Would you appreciate it if one supermarket bought all the food and then price gouged you 100 dollars for meat?

I don't see how a monopoly helps anyone but the corporation, and even then just in dollars today. Strangling the entire market doesn't help anyone in the long run.

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I'm not denying the antitrust concern of the union. I'm pointing out the hipocrisy of certain generally anti-regulation Silicon Valley companies trying to use antitrust law to preserve the viability of their role as middlemen. At the end of the day, Netflix's business model is inherently fragile. Amazon is somewhat better positioned, because they at least provide the upstream infrastructure. I think they know they need to play the last mile game, just as they're exploring doing on the physical goods side with drones and special deals with USPS.

note that Netflix runs on Amazon

I know. That's why Amazon is better positioned. They at least own the upstream infrastructure. Netflix is utterly dependent on three other industries, but is itself pretty easily replaceable. The had a first mover advantage in getting favorable content licensing deals before anyone thought it would matter, but that's fading fast as those deals are renegotiated. And its value add is totally fungible. People care about the content and will happily use another provider if they have the content. Netflix' foray into original content is an existential move.

Except it's not really that dependent on Amazon - there are nearly perfect substitutes for every AWS service.

Comcast is different because it already operates as a monopoly in many areas, and it's trying to change the rules so that it can leverage that monopoly, to the detriment of everyone but themselves, and there's not really anything that anyone but the regulators can do about it.

I wonder if torrent/p2p would be a viable business model for Netflix. Think about it : they have a massive install base inside comcast where they can run programs and on most such programs they can run code, and store data.

Solution seems obvious.

P2P isn't a good architecture for something like that. You pull data from a leaf node, through the core network, back to another leaf node, traversing the relatively slow last mile coax part of the network twice. Meanwhile, a relatively small number of movies and shows will dominate the demand, which Comcast can easily cache near the edges of its network. There is a reason Netflix is vying to get equipment in those spots.

Actually, they wouldn't arbitrarily price their products that way. Companies engage in a little thing called price discrimination. The only difference in a monopoly is that you are the sole price leader. That doesn't mean you can arbitrarily set the price high. Most cable companies have monopolies thru license in municipalities.

>That doesn't mean you can arbitrarily set the price high.

You can if you corner the market and the good is required like food is.

Just try. But first, you'll want a refresher on the French Revolution, letting the starving "eat cake" and the amazing effectiveness of guillotines.

Somehow that doesn't work this way. In israel monopolies and price gouging of food is pretty common(not 100X, but maybe 2x), and i haven't seen no violent acts.

You'll get your stores raided if you control and gouge something like food and water though, possibly ending with a head in a grocery cart. Police might even help.

Cable has a bit more leeway with the crowd I'd imagine, though there'd still definitely be consequences. Just not as dramatic consequences. I'd hope people protest gouged cable prices peacefully.

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