https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/can-trump-fcc-re...
Doesn't that mean agencies like this are not free to set their own rules when a law is ambiguous?
And isnt the cap on number of households reached actually codified unambiguously in federal law?
Seems to me like this should not be allowed to happen.
Let me know if I am wrong.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)
> The 39% cap was established by Congress in 2004.
1. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/08/06/federal-communicatio...
Agencies can say whatever they want but courts are not required to defer to them when this inevitably goes to a lawsuit.
Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts.
Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV.
Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV.
I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products.
Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
The people who watch it vote in numbers far out of proportion to their peers. Nobody would bother to capture the industry if it weren't worthwhile.
I think anybody with a gripe about "mainstream media" should really examine who owns most of the media (billionaires) and see the value in enforcing that more indepedent voices are heard, not less as the past three decades has been a relentless march towards.
The whole idea with the advent of the internet was that there would be so many more ways to be heard. That's been kinda true, but the public airwaves are dominated by corporate voices.
Why are you bundling all those things together? The only thing we care about here is cable or satellite TV for your argument.
If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.
The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
Broadcast TV today is a stream of bytes. The same stream can be delivered via cable, satellite, a cell phone, or home Internet.
From 2017, "Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
"John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasting brings 'troubling' rightwing bias to local news":
* https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/03/john-ol...
"John Oliver: How Sinclair Broadcast Group 'Brainwashes' Local News":
* https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/john-ol...
I mean sure, you could pack four streams into one 6MHz channel. They could even be "HD" insofar as the transmitted stream is 720p or 1080i.
The result would have been MPEG-2 program streams of about 4.5Mbit each instead of about 18-19Mbit (assuming no other subchannels). That would make live sports or anything with significant motion look like absolute dogshit.
You might say that you don't care about that, and that is fine for you. However, in that case, I would respectfully submit that opinion to be far from the center of the bell curve of television-viewing American public of that era.
We could do a lot better with ATSC 3.0. So, there might someday be a second round of broadcast frequency reclamation, just as there was with ATSC 1.0.
The Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that regulates the broadcast airwaves, voted Thursday to eliminate a cap on the share of U.S. television households a single company can reach, a major move that could pave the way for more corporate consolidation in the media industry.
In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience. The ownership limit will be replaced by a case-by-case approach.
The decision to remove the cap had been widely expected. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr last month wrote an op-ed for the conservative news website Breitbart calling the ownership limit an “outdated” policy that blocked local broadcasters from “gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy.”
“The cap no longer constrains the power of national programmers. Instead, it prevents local broadcasters from competing on a level playing field,” said Carr, a Republican who was appointed head of the FCC at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The 39% cap has been in place since 2004, when Congress boosted a previous 35% limit set in the 1990s. The rule remained unaltered for more than two decades partly because it is codified in federal law.
Carr has contended that the FCC nonetheless has statutory authority to scrap the rule — a position that is likely to face legal pushback. Free Press, a progressive consumer group, said it planned to sue over the FCC’s “unlawful power grab.”
Anna M. Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC, blasted the vote in similar terms, calling it “unlawful on its face.”
“Eliminating the cap does not free local broadcasters from economic pressure, it just changes who is doing the squeezing,” Gomez said in a statement. “The large station groups positioned to grow even larger under this decision are not local broadcasters, they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them.”
The vote pitted Gomez against Carr and a third commissioner, Olivia Trusty, a Republican who was also appointed by Trump.
The FCC’s move delivers a win to Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s largest owner of local television stations. Nexstar is seeking to acquire rival broadcaster Tegna in a $6.2 billion deal, though a federal judge put the transaction on hold after eight state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit. The combined entity would reach at least 60% of U.S. households.
Carr announced in March that Nexstar’s purchase of Tegna had been exempted from the 39% rule on a stand-alone basis, saying that decision was “consistent with longstanding FCC authorities.”
Nexstar and other top broadcast station owners have repeatedly urged the FCC to nix the limit, arguing that it prevented local TV channels from competing in a crowded media marketplace increasingly dominated by streaming video services, social media apps and other platforms that are not subject to similar ownership regulations.
“These rules were last updated before Netflix streamed a single movie, before the first iPhone, and before Instagram existed, and they continue to single out local broadcasters based on a competitive landscape that disappeared with the VCR,” a Nexstar spokesperson said after the FCC announced it would vote on the rule.
“No one would suggest limiting the reach of YouTube, Amazon, or CNN, yet local broadcasters are still forced to compete under rules written for a different century,” the spokesperson added.
Carr’s efforts to scrap the rule have drawn vocal opposition from some consumer advocates and lawmakers. The opponents of the rule change have argued that nixing the cap would accelerate media consolidation, trigger rounds of layoffs, shrink the pool of independent station owners and limit viewpoint diversity on the airwaves.
“Trump’s FCC Chair is trying to illegally rewrite the rules to make it easier for billionaires to line their own pockets while jacking up costs and controlling what Americans watch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said. “After rubber-stamping the Nexstar-Tegna megamerger, this looks like the Trump administration’s latest attempt to roll out the red carpet for more antitrust disasters.”
The FCC’s critics have also repeatedly questioned whether Carr has the legal authority to change a policy put in place by an act of Congress.
“Brendan Carr cannot undo the limit that Congress set just because he feels like it,” said Matt Wood, the vice president of policy and general counsel at Free Press.