FCC Defends Axing Coordinated Retransmission Among Top Four

In a filing at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, the Federal Communications Commission defended its decision to limit coordinated retransmission consent.

The FCC told the court that it has the authority to prohibit joint retransmission, and actually took a less restrictive approach than it could have given that it found, and reasonably so, that joint negotiations by separately owned top-four stations violates the duty of the parties, by law, to negotiate retransmission consent in good faith. The FCC told the court that joint retransmission has led to retransmission price increases due to a lack of competition. The FCC said that anticompetitive impact was "particularly pernicious when two or more of the four most popular broadcast stations in a market team up to negotiate retransmission consent." The FCC pointed out that its rule change did not sweep in all stations, just those in that particularly pernicious category.