Can’t stream baseball’s opening day? Blame the DOJ

With baseball’s opening day less than a month away, fans across the country are realizing that they no longer can access their favorite team’s games. Sinclair Broadcasting, which acquired the rights to all of the Fox Sports affiliate stations in 2019, has failed to make a deal with many major streaming services for the 2021 season. Fox Sports Regional Sports Networks, so called “RSNs,” are the main broadcast network for more than half of the teams in Major League Baseball and 15 teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA). 

Across sports media and social media, frustration is rampant. Why are there no deals with what has become the main means of accessing television for younger people? Yet, like many problems in today’s society, the true cause appears to be the federal government.

In 2018 when Disney proposed acquiring 21st Century Fox Inc., the Department of Justice (DOJ) was required to approve the transaction. The DOJ failed to do so at first, arguing that without competition between Disney’s and Fox’s sports properties consumers would pay even more for their cable subscriptions. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to block the proposed transaction, requiring Fox to divest of its RSNs before the sale to Disney could be approved. Disney found a willing partner in Sinclair Broadcasting, which purchased the rights to the RSNs for $9.6 billion with DOJ approval.

The goal of antitrust laws is to aid consumers in ensuring that monopolies don’t raise prices beyond the means that the average consumer is willing to pay. Yet the end result here has been the opposite. Sinclair has been unable to make deals with YouTubeTV, Hulu, FuboTV and other streaming services that consumers increasingly rely on as an alternative to expensive traditional cable and satellite television plans. Such streaming services have provided consumers with a viable alternative to “cut the cord” and move on from what many now consider to be old-fashioned means of providing media content. 

The failure of government antitrust intervention to help consumers is not a new phenomenon. In 1982, the government used antitrust laws to mandate the breakup of “Ma Bell” into subsidiary outlets such as BellSouth and BellAtlantic. The government clearly didn’t foresee the birth of cell phones, which rendered traditional phone systems obsolete within 20 years and the antitrust lawsuits related to them ridiculous. Currently, the many states and the federal government engage in antitrust lawsuits against Facebook even as it is being supplanted by alternative outlets such as TikTok and Snapchat that are far more popular with younger social media users. One might ask MySpace founder Tom Anderson about the permanency of social media dominance.

The bottom line is that the government is not an entrepreneur and generally lacks the foresight to determine what is and isn’t good for consumers. Requiring the spinoff of the RSNs in order for 21st Century Fox to be acquired by Disney has reduced the ability of millions of baseball and basketball fans to watch their team’s games — the latest victims of the paternalism of shortsighted federal policies. We ought to be extremely weary of government intervention in the free market, and this saga is just the latest cautionary tale.

Will Flanders, Ph.D., is the research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. Follow him on Twitter @WillFlandersWI.