A Torrington man wants a law empowering consumers to charge their cable companies “rent” for allowing their unwanted cable boxes to stay in customers’ homes.

“I’ve got to keep it warm, I’ve got to feed it electricity. If anything happens to it, I’ve got to pay $175,” Stephen Simonin shared with the regulatorily-toothless Litchfield County Cable Television Advisory Council.  “It’s absolutely insane,” he said before being elected chairman of the Council.

The Republican-American covered the converter box debacle, and the ongoing dispute between Cablevision and Scripps-owned HGTV and Food Network, thrown off the cable lineup on New Year’s Day.

The growing variety and intensity of disputes between consumers and largely deregulated cable operators may signal a growing backlash against the cable industry and its potential for a more regulated future.

In the absence of regulation, Simonin said, “it is like the wild west.”

Simonin lodged official complaints about his converter box long before his wife began griping about the absence of Food Network from the family television. State regulators are equally powerless to force cable companies to provide content without converter boxes, or specific channel offerings, as are the various cable advisory councils.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said he opposed the federal law that deregulated the cable television industry in 1996, and continues to oppose it.

“I have said again and again and again over the years, Congress not only stripped states of their power to effectively protect consumers, but also failed to provide for federal protections,” Blumenthal said. There “really is no effective oversight or scrutiny.”

Telecommunications company-owned equipment, and the rental fee income earned from it, can occasionally be a source for profit-padding, especially when providers don’t allow customers to purchase and own their own equipment.  Television sets were supposed to be designed to accommodate digital cable transmissions without a required converter box as the country adopted new digital television-capable sets, but consumer experiences with a cable-box-free CableCARD plug-in cards have been mixed.

“The situation is infinitely more complicated than that suggests,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of Media Access Project. Schwartzman said about 90 percent of the televisions currently in use do not have the capability Simonin describes, though he agrees “companies like Cablevision are, in fact, monopolizing the set top box to their benefit.”

Schwartzman said the FCC has promised prompt review of a petition filed two weeks ago that demands consumers be allowed to purchase a converter box from a third party, rather than be forced to rent a box from their cable provider.

“This is a very active issue right now,” Schwartzman said.