WASHINGTON—In a new letter to the Federal Communications Commission, the NAB is arguing that the agency should “completely repeal” ownership rules limiting the reach of broadcast station groups rather than simply liberalizing or modernizing the rules so that station groups can reach a larger percentage of U.S. homes.
“For more than two decades, the national TV rule has prohibited any entity from owning local commercial TV stations reaching, in the aggregate, more than 39 percent of the total number of TV households in the nation,” the letter said. “This outmoded rule prevents broadcasters – but not any other video service providers – from competing for audiences and vital advertising revenues across the country and harms the public’s free, over-the-air (OTA) television service. The time to eliminate this harmful restriction is now.”
In its arguments, the NAB hinted at the industry’s hopes that the current administration and FCC chair Brendan Carr will be more receptive to changing the ownership caps. The letter noted that in 2017, during the first Trump administration, the FCC sought comment on modifying or eliminating the national audience reach limit.
In response to that effort, which did not result in any changes, then-Commissioner Carr observed that the FCC has had “rules on the books” limiting TV station ownership since the 1940s, and that, due to accelerating advances in technology and the advent of new offerings, broadcasters “now compete for eyeballs with YouTube stars, social media platforms, and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix—not to mention traditional cable and satellite offerings.”
In 2017 the NAB had advocated for the FCC to “at least do no harm, and essentially preserve the status quo by either retaining the 39 percent cap and discounting all stations (not just UHF) at 50 percent of their reach, or in the alternative, if the Commission was intent on eliminating the discount, to raise the cap to 78 percent.”
In the new filing, the NAB goes much further. “[G]iven dramatic changes in the video and advertising markets since 2017, the…(NAB) now urges the Commission to expeditiously conclude this rulemaking and completely repeal the outdated and competitively harmful national broadcast TV ownership restriction.”
The “continued marketplace trends over the past seven years make clear there is simply no good reason to keep any artificial limits on TV station groups’ audience reach,” the filing bluntly stated. “With Google and Facebook gobbling up local advertising revenues and stations competing with unconstrained streaming platforms for viewers’ time and attention, the FCC must end this limitation and allow broadcasters to better serve the public interest. NAB’s Television Board – with members ranging from those owning a handful of stations to the largest local broadcasting companies in the country – supports without opposition the position of broadcasters, including Nexstar, Sinclair, Univision, and others, which have persuasively argued in the record that the national TV rule in any form does not promote, but instead harms, competition, diversity, and localism and should be eliminated entirely.”
Much of the filing lays out masses of data showing how the competitive landscape of the TV and media industries has been transformed since the last time the rules were altered in 2004 and reiterates familiar arguments that the ownership rules have limited the competitive position of broadcasters compared to less regulated tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook.
The letter also spends many pages laying out the legal authority for the FCC making changes to the ownership rules in an attempt to rebut some observers who have argued that only Congress can change the rules. “If the FCC has authority to modify its calculation of national audience reach by repealing the UHF discount, then it also would have authority to change the method of calculating national audience reach in other ways,” the filing argued.
The full April 2, 2025 filing can be found here.
