Mr. Martin has long said that he favors à la carte because it’s pro-consumer, but most people in the cable industry — none of whom will speak on the record, for fear of angering the F.C.C. chairman — are convinced that he favors it for the same reason Mr. Winter does: it will allow parents to keep MTV and its ilk out of their homes. Mr. Martin, who is widely expected to run for office someday in his native North Carolina, has made no secret of the fact that he has “strong concerns” about the amount of sex, violence and profanity on television, as he put it in an interview this year with Broadcasting & Cable magazine.

Yet as appealing as the idea might seem at first glance, there is a reason that Congress has not taken the bait and passed an à la carte law. À la carte would be a consumer disaster. For those of you who yearn for it, this is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.”

Image Kevin J. Martin of the F.C.C. is the top backer of à la carte. Credit... Carol T. Powers/Bloomberg News

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For backers of à la carte, their big moment came in 2004, when Michael K. Powell, a champion of deregulation, was still F.C.C. chairman. Asked by Congress to look into the feasibility of à la carte pricing Mr. Powell had the F.C.C.’s economists work up a study. To the surprise of many — including, I’m told, Mr. Powell himself — the study concluded that à la carte would have the exact opposite effect from what its backers claimed. Instead of reducing prices, à la carte would cause cable bills to rise for most people. And it would cause many channels to go out of business. Mr. Powell turned the study over the Congress, and that was that.

Except it wasn’t. Soon afterward, Mr. Martin was named chairman of the commission — and one of his first acts was to “redo” the F.C.C. study. Sure enough, the new study attacked the old one, and claimed that à la carte would, indeed, be good for consumers. That, in turn, led to a flurry of condemnations and yet more studies that picked apart Mr. Martin’s study. The F.C.C. chairman was accused of doctoring the numbers to get the result he wanted. The study fiasco so hurt Mr. Martin’s credibility that when an à la carte bill came up in the Senate Commerce Committee last year — a bill Mr. Martin backed — it lost 20-to-2.

But wait: how can it be that à la carte will cause cable prices to rise? If you are subscribing to far fewer channels, doesn’t it therefore follow that your bill will be lower? Strange as this may seem, the answer for most people is no.

True, if you decide to take only one or two channels, à la carte pricing will save you money. But how many people are going to limit themselves to one or two channels? In fact, even if you pick as few as a dozen channels, à la carte will almost surely cost more than your current “exorbitant” cable bill.