Tech and AI
Disney and ABC ask a federal court to stop the communications regulator reviewing eight station licences years ahead of schedule
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
The claim was filed on 18 August in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. It says the regulator ordered eight owned and operated stations to file renewal applications years early, allowing thirty days for work that ordinarily takes months, and asks the court to halt the process while the case is heard. The regulator's chairman says the case has no merit.
Stations that broadcast over the public airwaves hold federal licences, and those licences come up for renewal on a fixed cycle. In late April the Federal Communications Commission ordered the eight television stations owned and operated by the Walt Disney Company to file their renewal applications ahead of that cycle. On the claimants' account the licences were not due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest.
What the claim says
The pleading opens with a proposition rather than a fact: that official suppression of speech is deeply un-American. It then puts the case in a sentence. Acting through the Commission, the administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against the network for a single reason, that it disapproves of what the network broadcasts. The claim relies on the First Amendment and on the principle, taken from a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision, that public power may not be used to punish or suppress disfavoured expression.
The procedural objection is separate from the constitutional one and may prove easier to run. The claim says the Commission issued an unprecedented order requiring the stations to file early applications years before renewal would have arisen in the ordinary course, and allowed only thirty days to prepare applications that ordinarily take months.
The relief sought
The claimants ask the court to stop the Commission immediately from taking or threatening to take any action against them in relation to the early renewal applications. They also asked for a speedy hearing and a temporary restraining order. That is an application to freeze a regulatory process rather than to overturn a decision, which is the shape a challenge takes when the decision has not been made yet.
That gap is the chairman's answer. In an interview on the Tuesday evening he said the agency had not yet decided anything about whether to renew the licences, and that the company would get a fair hearing before the agency.
Disney seems a little jumpy right now. Disney has chosen to go to court to try to block the FCC from moving forward with respect to at least some of the procedural options that are in front of the agency.
Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
He told a second interviewer the same day that the case would ultimately prove to be a meritless one, and that the agency would follow the facts and the law wherever they took it. An agency spokesperson said that all broadcasters have a legal obligation to operate in the public interest, and that the Commission had been examining claims of unlawful discrimination in the company's diversity practices for over a year.
A divided commission
The Commission's lone Democratic appointee took the opposite view in a statement welcoming the challenge.
I have long called on companies to push back against this kind of government intimidation, and I'm glad Disney has shown courage and stepped up.
Anna M. Gomez, Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission
For anyone advising a licensed or otherwise permissioned business, the interest here is not the politics. It is the question of when a regulator's procedural steps become reviewable. The claimants argue that bringing forward a renewal date, and compressing the time to respond, is itself the injury, whatever the eventual decision. The agency argues that nothing has been decided and there is therefore nothing to review. Courts have to answer that question in every jurisdiction that has an economic regulator, and the answer here will be worth reading.