Back in 1992, when cable pricing enjoyed unfettered rate hikes only a health insurance company could appreciate, sufficient anger among the American people helped push passage of a cable re-regulation bill to control the cable industry’s insatiable Ca$h Quest.  The legislation recognized that most consumers had little choice in pay television providers.  Although approximately three million Americans, mostly residing in rural areas, owned satellite dishes at the time, the vast majority of people stayed with cable.  The 1992 Cable Act covered broadcast basic service, usually local channels and a handful of home shopping and local public access channels, as well as enhanced basic service, usually called “standard service” these days, which included popular basic cable networks like CNN, The Weather Channel, and ESPN.  Your cable company could not raise prices on these services willy-nilly without authorization from regulators, which helped keep the price of cable down.  It also guaranteed that competitors could buy access to popular cable networks, many of which were owned or controlled by cable operators themselves.

But the Cable Act also provided a way out of rate regulation — when a local community enjoyed competitive choice among pay television providers, and when a certain percentage of local residents subscribed to that competitor.  For the remainder of the 1990s and early 2000s, that competition largely came from satellite providers DirecTV and DISH Network.  Unfortunately for cable, most communities didn’t have enough residents subscribing to satellite service to lift rate regulation, so the cable industry sent in the lawyers to sue over the Act’s constitutionality (they claimed it violated their freedom of speech) and the lobbyists to convince Washington to deregulate them once again.

The Clinton Administration presided over the wholesale deregulation of the industry once again in 1996, proof that lobbyist influence and big campaign contributions are about as bi-partisan as Washington gets.  But the revised law left in place access rights to cable programming, and rate regulation of the broadcast basic service.  It was open season for rate increases on standard service, and cable didn’t disappoint.  In most areas, the basic package quickly rose to nearly $50 after 1996.

Since only a small percentage of cable customers choose broadcast basic service, one might wonder why cable companies remain intent on bugging the FCC to get those rates deregulated as well, especially when the industry claims it won’t be dramatically raising prices on service post-deregulation.

Yet companies like Cablevision have employees who sit around and file “waiver requests” with the Commission to get rates deregulated across their service area.  Recently, they managed to get a waiver for service across Westchester County and Long Island, New York.  The FCC has determined Verizon FiOS provides sufficient competition for Cablevision, so the rate brakes are off.

Cablevision files for competition waivers routinely and does not expect the change to affect prices, a Cablevision spokesperson said.

“This is a routine acknowledgment by the FCC that Cablevision operates in a highly competitive marketplace, and we have received hundreds of these certifications across our service area over the last several decades,” the company said in a statement.

That leaves only one major point of contention between Cablevision and Verizon – access to the MSG Network, a regional sports channel.  Cablevision owns it and has it, Verizon wants it but Cablevision won’t let them have it.  Verizon contends that’s illegal under the program access provisions of the Cable Act, and the dispute is ongoing.

[Clarification: Cablevision will sell MSG in standard definition to Verizon, but refuses to provide the HD feed for FiOS customers, although it happily does so for some of its cable industry friends — Comcast and Time Warner Cable among them.  Further details in the comments.]