WGA Slam Disney, Amazon, and Netflix For “Gatekeeping” the Media Industry
The Writers Guild of America issued a report on Thursday, calling out the big three for being the “gatekeepers” for entertainment.
“Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are positioning themselves to be the new gatekeepers of media, growing through acquisitions and using their increased power to disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and to push down wages for creative workers,” states the guild.
The guild believes that the companies will “abuse a position of dominance” to harm other competitors in order to maintain their dominance. “These new gatekeepers have amassed market power through mergers and other anti-competitive practices, offering an alarming window into the future of media.”
Netflix and Disney are the largest distributors of streaming services and employers of television, theatrical, and digital writers. By acquiring competitive film studios (such as Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Marvel), they are essentially reducing output and innovation. The guild argues that during “the 2021-2022 season, every original scripted series made for Disney+ was self-produced, along with the vast majority of series on Hulu,” which forces writers and producers to sell their work to Disney in order to get their work on the platform.
With that, not only are the companies able to increase subscription rates, but they also have more control over creative workers.
Amazon, on the other hand, “has gained a sizeable imprint in multiple media businesses” using “its platform monopoly playbook".“Exploitative practices Amazon has employed include predatory pricing, aggressive acquisitions, and establishing, then abusing, its position between competitors and consumers,” the guild says.
“Each is now taking anti-competitive vertical integration to an extreme, turning its streaming service into a walled garden for self-produced content — a model built for and dependent on restricting the availability of independent content from competing producers, underpaying creators, and, above all, making future consolidation the name of the industry game.”
The guild is calling for more government regulation and oversight of the companies’ “anti-competitive practices.”
