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For TV viewers sick of forking out money month after month to rent their cable boxes, paying long after the cable company has recovered the cost of a box that never improves and locks out competing content, here’s an exciting headline: “FCC ruling could open flood gates in set-top box market.”

Wow. More content coming through better boxes you could actually buy. Sounds great. The bad news is, this headline ran on top of a story on a tech news website in May 1999.

Now, 17 years later, the Federal Communications Commission is about to try again to open the way for better cable boxes. On Thursday, Chairman Tom Wheeler will put his proposal for improving competition and consumer choice to a vote of the five-member commission.

Wheeler’s plan would start a lengthy process aimed at letting consumers buy cable boxes that could combine cable or satellite channels with content from providers such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others, all in one box and all searchable. If you wanted to watch the movie American Sniper, for example, you could search for it and compare prices to find the cheapest way to rent or buy it. Supporters of the idea hope bare-bones boxes would be available for less than $50, while boxes with DVRs and other features would go for hundreds more.

This has been a long time coming. Wheeler’s worthy proposal holds the potential to do for cable TV customers what the FCC did for telephone users beginning in 1968: Get rid of absurdly anti-competitive business practices that stifle innovation and force most consumers to rent instead of buy.

Don�t let FCC derail TV progress: Opposing view

Phone companies used to force customers to rent their clunky phones, charging more for any color besides basic black. The companies banned connecting anything other than company-approved devices to “their” phone lines. Then the FCC pushed back with a ruling that eventually sparked a communications revolution.

The pay TV industry has been lobbying furiously to stop the cable box proposal, and it’s not hard to see why. A Senate study found that about 99% of pay TV customers rent their boxes, spending on average about $231 a year. This generates more than $19 billion in annual revenue. According to the FCC, the average rental cost of a cable box has gone up 185% since the mid-1990s, while the cost of computers, TVs and cellphones has dropped by 90%.

The cable companies argue that previous FCC attempts to introduce choice in the cable box market have failed miserably, which they say proves that government meddling in their business is a terrible idea. Actually, the industry itself is largely responsible for the previous failures.

In response to a law passed by Congress in 1996, FCC eventually required cable companies to make available a “CableCard” that could be installed in a third-party box to allow it to receive pay-TV channels. But cable companies undermined the idea, requiring customers to pay extra monthly rental fees for the cards and often insisting that they be installed only by company technicians, a process one consumer website described as “waterboarding meets the DMV.” No wonder that as of July, customers of the nine largest pay TV providers had acquired just 617,000 CableCards vs. 53 million rental boxes.

Cable companies have no one but themselves to blame for customer anger over rental box rip-offs. Ironically, a better cable box might help the companies slow the stampede of cord-cutters who are learning to live without cable altogether.

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