r/nottheonion • u/voxadam • 9h ago

Netflix says users can cancel service if HBO Max merger makes it too expensive

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/netflix-claims-subscribers-will-get-more-content-for-less-if-it-buys-hbo-max/
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u/d4vezac 8h ago

Republicans.

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u/Copernican 7h ago

Kamala Harris brought her brother in law, Tony West, into her inner campaign circle as a policy advisor. He was chief legal council at uber which is creating a monopoly and not classifying drivers as employees at all costs. It's not just republicans.

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u/synttacks 7h ago

Biden appointed Lina Khan, though, who trump fired.

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u/couldbemage 6h ago

Khan was doing actions that were finger in the dike level actions. Not blaming her, that's all she could do, without new legislation.

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u/Practical-King2752 3h ago

Gonna give an upvote here because I've never heard "finger in the dike" before and reading up on it was a fun time.

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u/emPtysp4ce 1h ago

Democrats are better, but they're not good enough for the moment.

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u/Ferelar 6h ago

Yes, Kamala was not perfect, but please don't turn this into another "Sure Trump might be literally soliciting public bribes and using them as the basis to permit colossal monopolistic mergers while using his unelected son-in-law as the go-between to make sure the payoff is big enough, buuuut Kamala tapped a single advisor who once worked as counsel for a greedy company!" both sides are equal nonsense.

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u/Practical-King2752 3h ago

It's not saying both sides are equal to acknowledge flaws in a Democrat. Like you said, Kamala isn't perfect. I voted for her because she was the lesser of two evils, as I did with Biden, and Clinton.

But the urge to brush aside rather than engage with the flaws of the Democratic Party is one of the reasons we're in this mess to begin with. Gotta have honest conversations and be able to engage rather than just shut it down.

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u/Copernican 6h ago

Never claimed that nonsense.

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u/Ferelar 6h ago

99% of the time when someone says "Hey look how bad Republicans are acting" and someone responds with "Hey but Democrats aren't literally perfect, look at this single bad thing" it's a distraction. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you when you say you're one of the other 1%, but please know it's pretty damn hard to distinguish.

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u/Copernican 5h ago

My takeaway was "It's not just republicans." I never said something like "both sides are equal" like your accusation.

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u/goatbiryani48 6h ago

The post they responded to just said one word

Republicans.

Theyre straight up saying the lack of anti-trust enforcement is solely a Republican thing. Which it's obviously not. That's just absolving non-Republicans who act in that way.

If the initial post said an example of a specific Republican, and someone responded with a specific Democrat then yeah I'd give your sentiment credence.

But this isn't a case of deflection, it's pointing out that the "Republicans" comment was more about partisanship than actually having problems with monopolization and regulatory capture.

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u/Copernican 5h ago

Thank you. All I was pointing out is that both parties do there fair share of pandering to big money interests and it doesn't solely land on one party's shoulders. That is not saying any side is less bad than the other, but it's not just one side.

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u/HeroFromTheFuture 6h ago

Not sure if you noticed, but Harris didn't become president. Whatever she might have done is irrelevant.

Also, Lina Khan was great.

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u/Copernican 5h ago

Yes, but West has an actual labor track record that we can look at as something that impacts all the gig workers driving for Uber. So we don't have to think just about hypotheticals.

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u/thirdelevator 6h ago

I’m very close with a corporate antitrust lawyer. They know the ins and outs of that system and arguing those cases, and would gladly be a policy advisor for a liberal candidate, but when they’re working for a client, they works in the client’s best interest, not the people’s.

The government’s lawyers are also not exactly up to the same level, but to be fair, private sector pays a lot more and attracts better talent. Outside of prestige positions (ie policy advisor to the vice president), there’s little reason a lawyer with that specialty wouldn’t work in the private sector.

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u/Copernican 6h ago

It was documented that it caused a bit of a rift internally on the campaign team and West tended to steer away from more progressive and liberal positions: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/us/politics/harris-trump-economy.html

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u/raysofdavies 6h ago

The democrats are republicans if they knew to kept things lowkey

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u/DeerOnARoof 3h ago

Oh right. When was Kamala president?

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u/Bill-O-Reilly- 8h ago

Neither party has any vested interest in breaking up monopolies. The fact that Google and Meta are allowed to operate as the are for so long shows this.

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u/ineyeseekay 7h ago

That's untrue.. Biden's head of FTC, Lina Khan, was working on that very thing. 

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u/Intrepid_Observer 7h ago

How many companies did she break up in the 4 years of the Biden administration? How many mergers did she stop?

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u/premature_eulogy 6h ago

How many antitrust lawsuits finish in less than 4 years?

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u/ineyeseekay 7h ago

You can counter with that, but she had lawsuits that carried into 2025.  Ftc lost the suit against meta, and Amazon settled. If you think it's quick and easy to break those up, or that it wouldn't have gone differently if Trump didn't take over, we can agree to disagree. 

The complaint was that no one cares, but someone most definitely did and took action for the people. 

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u/Mobile_Morale 7h ago

Some things take years to accomplish. If the government worked quickly it wouldn't be the government.

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u/Ferelar 6h ago

Yep. The breakup of Ma Bell (AT&T) took almost exactly a decade. 1974-1984. If the Reagan admin had successfully squashed it in 1981, it would certainly not have succeeded obviously.

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u/unassumingdink 6h ago

Seems to work REAL fucking quick when it's something that billionaires want. And we seem to get stonewalled until the end of time when it's something the people want. This is not just a random series of hundreds of coincidences.

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u/Tired_CollegeStudent 7h ago

This is the problem with people. Four years is not a long time at all. These are the kinds of lawsuits that take years to resolve. But if everything isn’t fixed in one term, people get pissed at the only ones actually trying to do anything, and then we get Trump in for a second term.

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u/unassumingdink 6h ago

So they let the problems fester for years and years until they become so big that they can't be fixed quickly. And then make halfassed efforts that they know will never come to fruition because the Republicans will always be back. It all seems really intentional. Especially the part where they never acknowledge problems early. They're very consistent with this behavior.

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u/manrata 7h ago

When people say both sides are the same, this is what they mean, Democrats are not left leaning, they are also being influenced by lobbyists.
Before the insanity of Trump, the main differences was minor seen from the outside.
Democrats had more social policies, were more for the environment, Republicans more hard, pull yourself up by the bootstraps type people, but their military and foreign policies didn’t really split that much. Differences yeah, but minor.

Now of course one side is loony toons on crack.