ABC can beat Trump FCC's license threat if owner Disney is willing to fight

Broadcast license renewals are “all but automatic” due to 1996 change in US law. Disney will have the law on its side in its fight against the unusual broadcast license review ordered yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission, legal experts say. In 1996, Congress made it a lot harder for the FCC to take away a broadcast license, even when it’s up for renewal. “Since the NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] got an amendment in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, denying renewal to a broadcaster faces an almost insurmountable burden,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars this week. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a major update to the Communications Act, the 1934 law that established the FCC and provides the agency with its legal authority. “Although the FCC generally acts under the ‘public interest’ standard when granting and regulating licenses, the Act imposes more limits on FCC actions that would cancel licenses or deny their renewal or transfer,” Northwestern University law professor James Speta wrote last year in the Yale Journal on Regulation. The Yale Journal article was written in response to pr