Cite as: 520 U. S. 180 (1997)
O'Connor, J., dissenting
N. Y. State Crime Victims Bd., 502 U. S. 105, 120 (1991). Without a sense whether most adverse carriage decisions are anticompetitively motivated, it is improper to conclude that the statute is narrowly tailored simply because it prevents some adverse carriage decisions. See Board of Trustees of State Univ. of N. Y. v. Fox, 492 U. S. 469, 480 (1989) (scope of law must be "in proportion to the interest served") (internal quotation marks omitted).
In my view, the statute is not narrowly tailored to serve a substantial interest in preventing anticompetitive conduct. I do not understand Justice Breyer to disagree with this conclusion. Ante, at 227 (examining fit between "speech-restricting and speech-enhancing consequences" of must-carry). Congress has commandeered up to one-third of each cable system's channel capacity for the benefit of local broadcasters, without any regard for whether doing so advances the statute's alleged goals. To the extent that Congress was concerned that anticompetitive impulses would lead vertically integrated operators to prefer those programmers in which the operators have an ownership stake, the Cable Act is overbroad, since it does not impose its requirements solely on such operators. An integrated cable operator cannot satisfy its must-carry obligations by allocating a channel to an unaffiliated cable programmer. And must-carry blocks an operator's access to up to one-third of the channels on the system, even if its affiliated programmer provides programming for only a single channel. The Court rejects this logic, finding the possibility that the must-carry regime would require reversal of a benign carriage decision not "so prevalent that must-carry is substantially overbroad." Ante, at 216. The principal opinion reasons that "cable systems serving 70 percent of subscribers are vertically integrated with cable programmers, so anticompetitive motives may be implicated in a majority of systems' decisions not to carry broadcasters." Ante, at 216-217 (emphasis added). It is unclear whether the principal opinion means that anticompetitive
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