--- title: "Cable Industry Prepares to Sue Trump’s FCC Over the 39 Percent TV Cap" description: "State and regional cable groups say Congress fixed the national audience limit — and the commission cannot erase it" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-05T20:47:48Z modified: 2026-10-06T03:24:09Z url: https://rews.cc/a/cable-industry-prepares-to-sue-trump-s-fcc-over-the-39-perce-a32b27 language: en tags: ["regulation", "trump", "media", "fcc", "law", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Cable Industry Prepares to Sue Trump’s FCC Over the 39 Percent TV Cap *State and regional cable groups say Congress fixed the national audience limit — and the commission cannot erase it* By Jan Sokol · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/cable-industry-prepares-to-sue-trump-s-fcc-over-the-39-perce-a32b27 ## In brief - The FCC voted 2-1 on August 6 to scrap the 39% national TV ownership cap; the formal order was published last week - State and regional cable groups from 15 states plus New England, including Comcast, Charter and Cox, petitioned the FCC - The petition argues Congress fixed the cap at 39% in 2004, directly rejecting the FCC’s bid to raise it to 45% - The FCC says Congress merely directed it to modify rules, and it may act outside the quadrennial review process - The cable groups plan to sue in a US appeals court after Federal Register publication and seek a preliminary injunction There are numbers a republic chooses for its own protection, and for more than twenty years 39 percent has been such a number in America: no single owner may control broadcast television stations that together reach more than 39 percent of the country’s TV households, a ceiling applied with a 50 percent discount for UHF stations. On August 6, in a 2-to-1 vote, [President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission abolished that ceiling](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/technology/fcc-broadcast-tv-ownership.html), announcing it would weigh mergers beyond the limit one by one, case by case, [as Reuters reported](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-agency-votes-end-39-local-tv-station-ownership-cap-2026-08-06). Last week the formal order was published. Now the cable industry has answered. The answer came in a petition to the FCC itself, filed by state and regional cable associations speaking for providers in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and the six New England states, according to Ars Technica. Their members run from small operators to the nation’s biggest cable companies — Comcast, Charter, Cox — and they are asking the commission to stay the repeal of the national ownership cap. ## The Petition’s Case The filing’s argument is simple enough to fit on a judge’s first page: the cap belongs to Congress, not to the commission. Lawmakers fixed the figure in the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act, the petition says, and they did it precisely to stop the FCC of that era from pushing the limit higher — a decision the cable groups call unambiguous. > Congress established the National Cap at 39 percent in the 2004 CAA \[Consolidated Appropriations Act\] in direct response to the FCC’s attempt to aggressively raise the Cap to 45 percent and made repeated references to the 39 percent Cap in the statue ## The Commission’s Answer The FCC order published last week concedes the choice Congress made, then disputes what kind of choice it was. The law, the commission argues, set the limit by *directing the Commission to modify its rules rather than by enacting a fixed cap into law*. On that reading, the FCC *has the authority and obligation to reexamine the national cap rule in response to changing circumstances and to modify or repeal it if it no longer serves the public interest*. There remains the awkward sentence in the 2004 statute: during its quadrennial reviews of media ownership rules, the FCC may not repeal or modify the cap. The commission’s reply is a lawyer’s corridor — the prohibition governs the quadrennial review, and the cap was scrapped outside it. The law, the order says, *simply separates the Commission’s decisions to review the national cap from the statutorily mandated review of other media ownership rules that are to occur every four years*. ## The Road Through the Courts Everyone in Washington understands the choreography of what the cable groups have just done. The petition to the FCC is, as Ars Technica notes, mainly a procedural step: a commission rarely stays its own order. Once the order appears in the Federal Register, the associations intend to sue in a US appeals court, and then to ask that court for a preliminary injunction keeping the 39 percent cap in force while the litigation runs. Consider the inversion. The trade press [greeted the repeal as a victory for big broadcasters](https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/fcc-eliminates-tv-station-ownership-cap-nexstar-broadcaster-1236829194) — station groups such as Nexstar that dream of consolidation — and here are the cable giants, no friends of smallness themselves, manning the barricades to preserve a numerical fence. The FCC had been marching toward this since July 16, when it released a draft order proposing repeal, [according to the law firm Wiley](https://www.wiley.law/alert-FCC-Moves-to-Eliminate-National-Television-Audience-Reach-Cap). Regimes change, chairmen change; a number written into an appropriations act twenty-two years ago must now be defended in court by the very companies it was never meant to restrain.