It's not their only argument. But it's one that they lean on a too hard. I think because, as the balance of votes on my previous comment seems to indicate, it's very popular with most DRM opponents. Assuming that is the case, it's a big disappointment, because, in the context of an important public debate like this, preaching to the choir is a serious tactical error.

To your second point, I can't speak for most CEOs of large media conglomerates, but I would say that I've never been in the habit of believing that CEOs truly believe everything they say. Their messages are crafted.

What I can speak to, though, is what I was told when I was asked to evaluate copy protection strategies in a product I was working on, and tried to push back with the "but you can't make piracy impossible, anyway" argument. And it was basically the response I described above. Eventually I was able to come up with a compromise, which was that we would use a much less intrusive technology than the one that was originally proposed, on the grounds that even the most optimistic benefit to us didn't justify the added inconvenience to legitimate customers.

I don't think that argument works here, though, because the DRM in things like Netflix is so convenient for the average consumer that very few people even realize it's there.

Maybe that leaves us with only the "controlling competition" argument. Unfortunately, that one also seems like a tough case to make these days. The story of browser streaming over the past few years has been one of increasing competition. Once upon a time, Netflix had a near-monopoly. Now there are all sorts of streaming services. I mostly use two of the smaller paid ones, my public library offers streaming, and my partner and I are seriously considering canceling our Netflix subscription. If the goal was to squeeze out the competition, they don't seem to be having much success at it.

For my part, I think the main argument I'm left with is one of interoperability: I don't want my content to be tied to specific hardware devices. The situation with the Amazon Kindle is awful, and has really kind of killed ebooks for me. And it's a great example of content creators shooting themselves in the foot with DRM: They could have retained the ability to sell and distribute their own content if they hadn't worried so much about it. Instead, they just handed basically the entire digital book distribution market to Amazon, and Amazon proceeded to act like about as benevolent a dictator as Amazon always does. This is a slightly different story from how things work with streaming in browsers, though, so I'm not sure you can just stand that analogy up and use it as a solid argument.