Delete, Delete, Insert? New Regulatory Contradictions at the FCC

Two recent Federal Communications Commission documents have caught my attention. The first was a notice, captioned “In re Delete, Delete, Delete,” that proposes to eliminate legacy FCC rules “for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens.” The substance of this proceeding is familiar and commendable. At the direction of Congress, the FCC has periodically conducted similar proceedings since 1996 with an eye towards eliminating outdated rules as competition supplants the need for regulation. The second document was Chairman Brendan Carr’s open letter to Google, posted exclusively on X. The letter chastised Google’s YouTube TV service for failing to carry the Great American Family network, and it threatened to “expand” the FCC’s existing “program carriage” obligations as a solution to that supposed problem. This is odd. The program carriage rules are a relic of the cable monopoly days of the 1990s and have become obsolete with the rise of video competition. They are an obvious candidate for the Delete, Delete, Delete chopping block, not for “expansion.” And any FCC effort to force YouTube TV to carry this channel would violate both the Communications Act and the First Amendment. Chairman Carr presumably knows this. He is no stranger to the Act or the First Amendment. So why would he float a legally untenable proposal at war with the deregulatory ambitions of the new Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding? The answer appears to lie in the political orientation, not the substance, of these two documents.