Brendan Carr plans to let broadcast giants dominate the airwaves

**Brendan Carr**, Republican chair of the **Federal Communications Commission**, said in a **Breitbart** op-ed on Wednesday that the agency will vote on **August 6th** on ending the **national ownership cap** for broadcast television. The rule now blocks any single company from owning stations that together reach more than **39 percent** of US TV households. The August vote is the formal step that would decide whether that ceiling stays or goes.

The cap is a hard market-share limit, not a soft guideline. It treats national household reach as the unit of control: add up the TV households covered by a company’s owned stations, and stop before the total crosses **39 percent**. Removing it would change the ownership math for station groups that already sit near the line and for buyers that have been blocked from combining portfolios that would push them over it.

For engineers and builders in media tech, the rule shapes how large a single broadcast footprint can get under one owner. Station groups that grow past today’s limit would control more local transmission capacity, more local ad inventory, and more paths to push the same programming and apps across markets. That concentration affects who sets technical standards for over-the-air delivery, who negotiates carriage and data deals, and how much regional diversity remains in the broadcast stack.

The **39 percent** cap was written to keep one company from dominating national broadcast reach. Ending it would favor the largest station groups over smaller independent owners that cannot match national scale. Competitors still below the cap would face a different M&A map: more room for mega-groups to buy, and less room for mid-size players to stay independent if big buyers can keep stacking markets.

Watch the **August 6th** vote itself: whether the FCC ends the cap, keeps it, or changes the **39 percent** threshold. Also watch which station groups move first if the limit falls—those already closest to **39 percent** have the most immediate incentive to expand. Until that vote lands, the national ownership ceiling remains the binding constraint on how far one broadcast company can stretch across US TV households.