Michael Barbaro

And, Carl, you've actually explained this to me.

When you send a movie to the theater, the theater takes a lot of the money.

So if you're Netflix, giving up whether it's 50 or 40 or 30 percent of your revenue to some theater doesn't make a whole lot of sense when your central business is sending a streaming video to my bedroom in Brooklyn.

Okay, so these are the clear downsides of the Netflix Warner Brothers deal for the creative community and the theatergoer.

I want to talk about the upside for a minute.

And if you're a Netflix subscriber, I wonder if you're now going to get more for your money, specifically if you're a Netflix subscriber who also pays for something like HBO Max, which it would acquire in this deal.

And I think it's safe to say, I'm going to do a very quick poll, who among us

subscribes to HBO and Netflix.

Everybody?

Yep.

Everybody.

Okay.

So in theory, you might be paying less for those two when they're housed under the same roof, right?

Suffice it to say, there will be less competition between the two of them when they're owned by the same place.

If they want the price to go up, it will go up.

If they want the price to go down.

It will go down.

Lauren, Netflix is making a pretty interesting argument about why this merger, which puts a lot of things in one box, which is suddenly Netflix box, is not monopolistic.

And I wonder if you and Nicole, feel free to chime in on this too, can briefly summarize Netflix's case for why this is not something that the Trump administration should worry about when it comes to antitrust.

Nicole, does that argument feel compelling?