By: Justin Maglin
On October 30, 2025, Google-owned YouTube TV announced that channels owned by Disney, including ABC and ESPN, would be pulled from its service after the two companies failed to reach a new carriage agreement. The blackout affected more than ten million YouTube TV subscribers and cut off access to major sports broadcasts, including college football and Monday Night Football, prompting widespread frustration among viewers. Predictably, the two conglomerates blamed each other. Disney argued that “Google is using its market dominance to eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms we’ve successfully negotiated with every other distributor,” while Google countered that “Disney is proposing costly economic terms that would raise prices on YouTube TV customers and give our customers fewer choices while benefiting Disney’s own live TV products like Hulu + Live TV and, soon, Fubo.”
The timing made Disney’s position especially controversial. The dispute came the same week the company finalized its merger of Hulu + Live TV with Fubo, creating the second-largest virtual multichannel video programming distributor (vMVPD) in the United States, trailing only YouTube TV. That consolidation gave Disney new control in the live-TV streaming market at the same time it was withholding some of the industry’s most valuable content from its largest competitor.
To the average viewer, this back-and-forth between YouTube TV and Disney might have seemed like a routine blame game during a busy stretch of fall programming. In the end, the dispute was resolved after a two-week blackout, with ESPN, ABC, and other Disney-owned networks returning to YouTube TV. Still, the standoff points to a deeper legal issue about how much influence one company can hold over both content and distribution in the streaming era. The question, then, is what would happen if a dispute like this ever did reach court? Would Disney’s behavior be treated as ordinary negotiation under U.S. antitrust law, or could it raise concerns about abuse of dominance if the same conduct occurred in the European Union?
Under U.S. law, any potential challenge against Disney would likely fall under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits monopolization through exclusionary conduct. Any § 2 inquiry begins with monopoly power, defined by the Supreme Court as “the power to control prices or exclude competition,” which is more than mere size or bargaining strength. By that measure, Disney does not appear to hold monopoly power in the vMVPD market. YouTube TV remains the leading vMVPD, followed by Disney’s recently merged Hulu + Live TV and Fubo. Together, those services make up only part of a highly fragmented market that also includes Sling TV, DirecTV Stream, and other entrants. The Department of Justice’s decision to clear Disney’s acquisition of a majority stake in Fubo suggests that regulators did not view the transaction as creating or enhancing market dominance in the vMVPD space.
Not everyone accepts that view, however. Satellite providers DirecTV and EchoStar submitted letters to a U.S. District Court, arguing that the Disney-Fubo deal and the resulting dismissal of legal claims against Disney did not “address the underlying competition issues” and that Disney essentially paid Fubo “to ensure cooperation from an aggrieved competitor.” Senator Elizabeth Warren likewise warned that “Disney and Fubo will only increase their leverage and could use the reduced competition and the resultant market power to raise prices even further for sports fans across the country.” These concerns suggest that, while Disney may not yet meet the legal threshold for monopoly power, its consolidation strategy could eventually give it structural advantages that resemble monopolistic control.
Assuming, therefore, that Disney possesses monopoly power, a plaintiff would next have to show that its conduct was anticompetitive or exclusionary. A potential theory could be that Disney unlawfully leveraged its content monopoly to harm rivals by using the blackout as a way to divert subscribers from YouTube TV to its own competing services, Hulu + Live TV and Fubo. Google did not say this outright, but its statement that Disney’s demands “would benefit their own live TV products” certainly pointed in that direction.
However, modern U.S. courts have set a high bar for such “refusal to deal” claims. The controlling precedent is the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Verizon Communications, Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP, which established that a firm with a lawfully acquired monopoly generally has no duty to deal with its rivals. To fit within the narrow exception recognized by the Court, a plaintiff would need to show that Disney’s conduct is akin to that in Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp. The Trinko court explained that the key fact in Aspen Skiing was the defendant’s termination of a voluntary and profitable course of dealing, which suggested a “willingness to forsake short-term profits to achieve an anticompetitive end.” Therefore, a challenger to Disney’s blackout would have to prove that Disney’s decision was not a rational business decision aimed at maximizing profit but rather an economically irrational act motivated solely by its desire to eliminate competition. This is an exceptionally difficult standard to meet in a hard-fought contract negotiation where seeking higher fees is a presumptively valid business justification.
Google would likely have better luck in the European Union. European regulators have adopted a more preventive approach to digital competition, relying on both Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Like U.S. antitrust law, which requires exclusionary conduct by a monopolist, Article 102 prohibits the abuse of a “dominant position.” Such a position exists where “the economic power held by a company allows it to hinder competition in the relevant market by behaving to an appreciable extent independently of its competitors and consumers.”
Establishing dominance in the EU is considerably easier than proving monopoly power in the United States. As scholars note, “[I]n the U.S., this statutory requirement often is proven indirectly with evidence of high market shares in well-defined antitrust markets, typically those that exceed 60–70 percent, coupled with high entry barriers and fairly static market dynamics. In the EU, however, ‘dominance’ can be found with market shares below 40 percent as long as the Commission finds that the firm has the ability to behave independently of its competitors, customers, and consumers.” By that reasoning, in the vMVPD market, the European Commission could find that Disney holds a dominant position if its combined control of Hulu + Live TV and Fubo, together with exclusive access to ESPN and ABC, allows it to act independently of rivals.
U.S. and EU antitrust law also differ greatly when it comes to refusals to deal. As Truth on the Market explains, “[W]hile the United States has limited the ability of either enforcement authorities or rivals to bring such cases, EU competition law sets a far lower threshold for liability.” Although EU law theoretically requires that the input be indispensable and that competition be eliminated, in practice, “all of these conditions have been relaxed significantly by EU courts and the commission’s decisional practice,” as shown in the 2007 Microsoft ruling, where it was “sufficient merely to show limitation of technical development in terms of less incentive for competitors to innovate.”
Applying that standard, the European Commission could more easily find that Disney’s conduct amounts to an abuse of dominance. By combining control of Hulu + Live TV and Fubo with exclusive access to must-have programming like ESPN and ABC, Disney could be seen as holding the kind of market power that “allows it to hinder competition” in the vMVPD market. Its decision to withdraw these channels from YouTube TV while continuing to make them available on its own platforms could fit within the EU’s relaxed refusal-to-deal framework, since the blackout would reduce consumer choice and limit rival growth even without completely eliminating competition.
The DMA provides a modern alternative to Article 102 as a route for enforcement. It imposes ex ante obligations on large “gatekeeper” platforms such as Apple, Meta, and Amazon to ensure “fairer and more contestable” markets, with violations punishable by fines of up to ten percent of global turnover. In April 2025, Apple was fined €500 million for technical restrictions that prevented developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store, and Meta was fined €200 million for its binary “Consent or Pay” advertising model, which the Commission found failed to give users a meaningful data-choice option. Later that year, regulators opened a new investigation into Apple’s App Store terms for impeding interoperability. Under the DMA, if Disney were designated a gatekeeper, its simultaneous control over must-have content and a competing vMVPD platform could amount to self-preferencing or limiting market access.
That kind of early intervention contrasts with the United States’ more hands-off approach. The current administration’s focus on protecting American companies suggests that big changes to U.S. antitrust enforcement are unlikely anytime soon, but as companies like Disney continue to grow across both sides of the market, that stance may be harder to defend. Whether the U.S. continues to rely on market self-correction or begins moving toward something closer to the EU’s more proactive model will likely depend on how future disputes in digital media unfold.
