The Federal Communications Commission has no statutory authority over Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Max, or Peacock. In the 10 days between April 17 and April 23, Chairman Brendan Carr’s agency moved on three fronts that all touch them anyway.
The NFL met in person with Carr’s chief of staff, an attorney advisor to the chairman, and the deputy chief of the Media Bureau on April 17, then filed an ex parte notice four days later in MB Docket No. 26-45, the open proceeding in which Carr has questioned whether the league still merits its 1961 antitrust exemption now that more games are migrating to streaming. On April 22, the Media Bureau released Public Notice DA-26-392, opening a children’s-rating inquiry that explicitly asks whether streaming platforms interpret TV-Y14 more loosely than broadcasters do. On April 23, a coalition led by Free Press and Public Knowledge filed a Statement of Issues at the DC Circuit appealing the bureau’s March 19 waiver order approving Nexstar Media Group’s acquisition of TEGNA. That deal now sits in two parallel court tracks: the DC Circuit appeal, and a separate antitrust preliminary injunction issued April 17 by US District Judge Troy Nunley.
Read individually, each item belongs to its own beat: sports rights, culture war, broadcast consolidation. Read together, they describe a posture. The agency that does not regulate streaming is using every adjacent lever it owns to assemble a record about it.
The three fronts
The TV Parental Guidelines inquiry is the cleanest expression of the strategy. DA-26-392 asks whether ratings disparities exist “across broadcast, MVPDs, and streaming platforms” and whether streamers are “more broadly interpreting what is allowable in categories intended for audiences under TV-Y14” than broadcast peers. The FCC has Title III authority over the broadcasters and Title VI authority over the cable operators those questions reach; it has no equivalent over Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, as The Desk noted. The notice nonetheless invites streaming platforms to file by May 22.
Commissioner Anna Gomez, the FCC’s only Democrat, dissented through the trade press. In remarks to Politico carried by Variety, Deadline, and Metro Weekly, she said “American families are worried about affordability, access and rising costs, not whether the TV ratings system has enough warnings about gender identity,” and pointed to the most recent TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board annual report: “only 11 pieces of public correspondence relevant to the board’s work, and spot checks turned up just two instances where a rating actually needed to be changed.” Her conclusion to Politico was a single line: “This is a solution in search of a problem, and another example of this Commission prioritizing culture war politics over the real issues that affect consumers every day.”
The sports docket is the second front, and the older one. MB Docket No. 26-45 opened February 25 with Public Notice DA-26-188, framed as a market-developments inquiry into game inventory migrating away from free over-the-air broadcast. The proceeding has drawn more than 8,600 public comments, most arguing affordability and access. Carr personally raised the stakes on March 27, telling a Washington audience reported by Fox News: “Does the NFL still benefit from the antitrust exemption when they’re negotiating for carriage of games not on a sponsored telecast, but on a streaming service? That’s a very live, very ripe question.” He went further at the same event, per the same Fox News report: “There is a point at which you sort of tip the scale, and they’ve just put too many games behind a paywall, and then that whole exemption collapses.”
The NFL’s response was to send senior people. The April 21 ex parte filing records an April 17 in-person meeting with Greg Watson, Carr’s chief of staff; Allison Howell, an attorney advisor to the chairman; and Evan Morris, deputy chief of the Media Bureau. Brendon Plack, the league’s SVP for public policy, signed the notice; Hans Schroeder, the NFL’s top media executive, attended. The filing’s argument is empirical: “For many years, 100% of NFL games have aired on broadcast television in the home markets of the competing teams,” and “Our contracts with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC account for the distribution of more than 87% of all NFL games.” Translated, the league is asking the FCC to let the broadcast share of the schedule do its statutory work.
The Nexstar/TEGNA waiver is the third front, and the most contested. On March 19 the Media Bureau, not the full Commission, issued DA-26-267, waiving the 39% national broadcast ownership cap to permit a combined entity that reaches “54.5% of the national audience, after taking into account the 50% discount applied to UHF stations,” conditioned on six station divestitures. The bureau-level approval, rather than a Commission vote, is exactly what the April 23 DC Circuit Statement of Issues challenges. Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Broadband Communications Association of Pennsylvania argue the bureau exceeded its delegated authority. Public Knowledge’s March 19 release framed the timing pointedly: “On February 7, President Trump posted that the merger should be approved… FCC Chairman Brendan Carr echoed him within hours.” The release called the outcome “inevitable once the president gave his marching orders to the FCC.” Those words belong to Public Knowledge; we are reporting that the appellants are saying them.
The agency-approved deal is also enjoined. Judge Nunley’s preliminary injunction, granted April 17 and effective April 20, blocks integration on antitrust grounds in a separate proceeding led by DirecTV. Nexstar/TEGNA is therefore FCC-approved, court-enjoined, and on appeal at once. At the NAB Show on April 20, Media Bureau officials David Brown, Evan Morris, and Alexander Sanjenis declined to discuss the approval; Carr did not attend. Senator Ted Cruz is among Republicans publicly critical of skipping the full-Commission vote.
The lever choice
The throughline across the three fronts is the choice of instrument. None is a streaming regulation, because the FCC cannot issue one. All are formal agency actions in the surfaces the FCC does control, asking questions or making waivers that route through streaming as a matter of fact.
Public Notices and Notices of Inquiry create dockets, not rules. Dockets accumulate filings. A record built across MB Dockets 19-41 and 26-45, covering ratings consistency, sports-rights migration, and affordability, becomes the citable substrate Congress could later use if it chose to draft Title V-equivalent authority over streaming. That is the soft-power read of this 10-day window: the FCC is not legislating, and is not pretending to. It is making the case.
The instrument set extends past the docket process. The March 27 NFL antitrust comments are a public statement. The Nexstar/TEGNA waiver is a Media Bureau order on broadcast licenses. The TV-Y14 inquiry is a Public Notice, the lightest formal instrument available. None imposes obligations on a streaming service. Each produces a reviewable record that names streaming: distribution math, ratings inconsistencies, consolidation pressures. The pattern is consistent with the public-interest framing Carr has used since taking office, when he told CBS News broadcast licenses are not a “property right”: use the licenses you grant to discipline behavior on platforms you do not.
For ad buyers, distributors, and rights holders, the immediate exposure is reputational and political rather than enforcement. None of the three actions changes a streamer’s compliance burden as of this week. The durable risk is the docket itself: a record built on questions asked over years can be cited later, in a different administration or Congress, as the basis for statutory expansion. The harder constraint, on current evidence, is the courts. The DC Circuit appeal of DA-26-267 tests whether bureau-level waiver authority can carry a case the appellants frame as sub-rosa coordination with the executive. Judge Nunley’s preliminary injunction has already drawn the antitrust line independently. Even on transactions where Carr has said the FCC will play “no role”, the directional posture has been consistent. If either case hardens into a precedent, the soft-power posture meets a real ceiling.
The posture cannot order Netflix to change a TV-Y14 rating, strip the NFL’s antitrust exemption, or prevent the DC Circuit from vacating the Nexstar/TEGNA waiver. It can make every one of those questions into an open administrative record with the streaming layer named in each. The next dated triggers are the May 22 comment deadline on the TV-Y14 docket, the DC Circuit briefing schedule on the cap-waiver appeal, and the Eastern District of California’s calendar in the antitrust case.
