According to Kevin Maney, in USA Today (page 3B), Walmart is shocked--shocked--that downloads of movies from the iTunes store are being sold for less money than the old-fashioned DVDs that use enormous energy to make and transport. Walmart is upset that they might be losing sales to digital downloads, and they apparently want someone to do something about it.
In this case, the giant retailer is apparently pressuring the Hollywood content owners that license the movies for sale to force Apple and other online retailers to keep prices artificially high. This is the part that baffles me. Hardly a week goes buy that we don't see some article about some business being disrupted by the Internet. However, too often these businesses are demanding special protection against the big bad Internet. Somewhere along the way, too many American businesses have acquired the bizarre notion that government and/or consumers owe them something--that something being the inalienable right to sell something nobody wants anymore.
In the case of movies, no one wants to get in their car and fight the traffic in the Walmart parking lot and the long lines at the checkouts to buy a $12 movie. Not if they have broadband and can download it from the 'net.
We are seeing the same strange thinking from the big telecom companies, whose entire business model is slowly but surely going to be stripped from them in the coming decade as we move to community-managed digital road systems that lower telecom prices and provide a lot more choice. But some telcos think they have somehow acquired a natural right to a monopoly on telecom, and that it is the government's job to force everyone to pay more for poor service.
These companies have only two choices in the real world: adapt to changing markets or go out of business. In their bizarro world where everything is backwards, they apparently think they can stay the same forever. I don't think so. Too much money is at stake, and as businesses, government, and citizens figure out better ways to buy stuff like music and videos, these companies will have to leave bizarro world and join the rest of us.