The FCC Still Thinks You Have Rabbit Ears
Federal video regulation still treats broadcast, cable, and streaming as separate worlds. Consumers do not. The gap between how the law classifies video services and how people actually watch them is widening, and it increasingly distorts competition across the modern media marketplace.
Last week, the International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE) hosted a panel on the future of video competition in the United States. The conversation ranged widely—from broadcast-ownership caps and retransmission consent to smart-TV intermediaries, data-driven advertising, and the role of user-generated content. A consistent theme emerged: the legal silos structuring federal video regulation no longer reflect consumer experience. As Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revisit video-competition policy in the coming year, those tensions will become harder to ignore.
For casual observers, the debate may appear limited to recent FCC broadcast-rule enforcement or high-profile streaming mergers. More attentive followers may point to broadcast-ownership reform or consolidation among major streaming firms. These developments, though, are only surface manifestations. As the video marketplace evolves, regulators confront a growing set of distinct but interrelated policy questions.
At the center of these changes is a simple fact: consumers no longer care about technical distinctions among cable, broadcast, and streaming. They just want to watch the content they choose. The FCC’s legal categories, however, were built for a 20th-century broadcast environment. They do not map cleanly onto how video is marketed, discovered, and consumed today. Updating regulation requires understanding how consumers perceive substitutable services and how siloed rules across technologies can impede competition on the merits.
Many of these distortions do not stem from recent FCC action, but from the Communications Act’s statutory architecture. Title III’s broadcast-licensing regime and Title VI’s cable-specific mandates were designed for spectrum scarcity and infrastructure bottlenecks that no longer define the marketplace. Piecemeal administrative action cannot resolve these structural tensions. A durable solution will require congressional engagement, not merely agency reinterpretation.