Guthrie Plans Cable Act 'Update'; More AI Moratorium Changes Possible
House Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said Tuesday that it’s “time to have a real conversation and update the 1992 Cable Act,” a revamp that would likely take aim at retransmission consent, must-carry and network non-duplication rules, lobbyists said. The lawmaker announced plans to revisit the statute during a Media Institute event, saying it was part of a broader “modernization” of U.S. media laws, in tandem with the FCC Media Bureau’s move to seek comment on relaxing national broadcast-ownership limits (see 2506200052).
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Guthrie also said it’s possible that a final budget reconciliation package deal will include additional changes to a federal preemption of state-level AI laws, including a shorter-term moratorium than the 10-year period included in the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR-1). The Senate is eyeing a modified proposal in its Commerce Committee’s budget reconciliation proposal, which, critics claim, would threaten participants in NTIA’s $42.5 billion BEAD program (see 2506230043).
The 1992 Cable Act “was a landmark law of its era [that] provided important policy direction, aiming to provide a fair, consistent marketplace and another period of rapid innovation,” Guthrie said. But “the rules we wrote in 1992 no longer reflect the realities [of the media marketplace] of 2025.” Lawmakers “need to take a look at whether overhauling the Cable Act would level the playing field, reduce regulatory burdens and give both programmers and providers the freedom to innovate in response to consumer demand,” he said. “We need to level the playing field not by heaping new regulations on new industries and technologies to slow them down, but by taking a hard look at what outdated laws and regulations need to be repealed and replaced and reformed to unleash innovation.”
A Cable Act revamp “doesn't mean abandoning public interest obligations or deregulating for its own sake in an academic sense,” Guthrie said. “It means recognizing that the market has changed and that our laws need to change,” too. Lobbyists told us they expect an update to the statute would target the retrans negotiations process, noting that House Communications Subcommittee members criticized the rules during a 2023 hearing (see 2309130072). Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., now the House majority leader, was pushing his Modern Television Act as recently as 2021 to repeal parts of the Cable Act, including retrans rules (see 2103110064).
'Generational Opportunity'
Congress and the FCC have a “generational opportunity … to debate the path forward” on media regulations, Guthrie said. “We must take steps to relieve the burdens of legacy regulation so that these institutions of American media are able to unleash innovation at a sustainable rate to better compete in a pro-consumer marketplace.”
A broader regulatory revamp shouldn’t involve “sacrificing crucial principles that have guided American media policy for decades," he said. "We are taking a hard look at the laws and regulations in place that inhibit the ability of certain industries to compete, rather than imposing regulations on new entrants to slow their progress.”
Guthrie said he doesn't “support taking action to impose cable-era regulations on trending platforms [but backs] the FCC relaxing broadcast-ownership rules so that local broadcasters can better compete at scale and continue serving their community.”
House Commerce “stands ready to address … remaining issues” that the FCC doesn’t tackle in the broadcast cap proceeding. He gave a vague response to a question about whether a media law revamp would reexamine content-based media regulations, such as the FCC’s news distortion rule that's central to an FCC proceeding against CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee (see 2503210060). “I’m open to that,” Guthrie said. “I’ll learn more about it.”
The legislator also acknowledged that Senate Commerce’s modified AI reconciliation language, which implicates BEAD applicants’ funding eligibility based on whether they pause enforcement of state-level regulations, differs from HR-1’s preemption proposal. Senate Commerce’s changes to its proposal helped the language clear the chamber parliamentarian’s review of what provisions would be germane under chamber rules for reconciliation measures not to be subject to the usual 60-vote cloture threshold.
“Hopefully, it will pass the Senate, [but] we have more work to do” to negotiate between that measure and HR-1, Guthrie said. “We've had some people make some pretty strong comments” against including either version in a final reconciliation package. “Hopefully, something will pass [via reconciliation] with an AI dimension. I'm not sure if it'll be [a 10-year moratorium] or not in the end, but what I would like to have is enough time for Congress to do its work … to have a federal standard” on AI regulation, he said: The aim isn't to be “preempting 50 states’ [AI laws]. We want to prevent 50 states having a national standard.”