216
Opinion of the Court
tailored to preserve a multiplicity of broadcast stations for the 40 percent of American households without cable. Cf. Ward, 491 U. S., at 799, n. 7 ("[T]he essence of narrow tailoring" is "focus[ing] on the source of the evils the [Government] seeks to eliminate [without] significantly restricting a substantial quantity of speech that does not create the same evils"); Community for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U. S., at 297 ("None of [the regulation's] provisions appears unrelated to the ends that it was designed to serve"). Congress took steps to confine the breadth and burden of the regulatory scheme. For example, the more popular stations (which appellants concede would be carried anyway) will likely opt to be paid for cable carriage under the "retransmission consent" provision of the Cable Act; those stations will nonetheless be counted toward systems' must-carry obligations. Congress exempted systems of 12 or fewer channels, and limited the must-carry obligation of larger systems to one-third of capacity, 47 U. S. C. § 534(b)(1); see also §§ 535(b)(2)-(3); allowed cable operators discretion in choosing which competing and qualified signals would be carried, § 534(b)(2); and permitted operators to carry public stations on unused public, educational, and governmental channels in some circumstances, § 535(d).
Appellants say the must-carry provisions are overbroad because they require carriage in some instances when the Government's interests are not implicated: The must-carry rules prohibit a cable system operator from dropping a broadcaster "even if the operator has no anticompetitive motives, and even if the broadcaster that would have to be dropped . . . would survive without cable access." 512 U. S., at 683 (O'Connor, J., dissenting). See also NCTA Brief 25- 26. We are not persuaded that either possibility is so prevalent that must-carry is substantially overbroad. As discussed supra, at 201-202, cable systems serving 70 percent of subscribers are vertically integrated with cable programmers, so anticompetitive motives may be implicated in a
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