Seven in 10 Australian households could not watch Sunday’s one day international cricket match between Australia and South Africa. Only about three in 10 households subscribe to the pay TV service Foxtel, which had exclusive broadcasting rights.

It is the first time that a one day international involving Australia on Australian soil has not been available on free-to-air TV.

The lack of availability is the result of a six-year deal signed last April when Cricket Australia gave the TV rights to the Seven network and Foxtel. They offered more money than a rival bid by the Nine and Ten networks, which would have kept all Australian men’s international matches available on free-to-air TV.

It was reported that Seven would pay $75m and Foxtel $100m. In the deal, Foxtel will simulcast all Tests with Seven, and have exclusive rights to international one day and 20-over matches plus some Big Bash matches, and exclusive digital rights.

In bidding for sporting rights, there is a different financial calculus for a pay TV operator and a free-to-air broadcaster. The free-to-air station has to decide how many extra viewers and hence advertising the event will bring, and on this alone it must recoup its investment. The pay TV operator sees gaining the rights as part of a strategy to secure more subscriptions. So quite commonly it is willing to outbid the free-to-air networks in order to build its subscription base.

For the sporting bodies, this is a Faustian bargain – more immediate income but fewer viewers; and choosing to make their product unavailable to many, indeed most, of their existing fans.

And so it proved on Sunday. Foxtel averaged 205,000 viewers – 277,000 in the first session down to 133,000 in the second session as it was clear Australia was on the road to a massive defeat. In contrast the first ODIs in recent series had around 1 million viewers. It is likely this trend will continue and the audiences for these matches will be around one-quarter to one-fifth what they used to be on free to air.

So Cricket Australia has traded more money for fewer viewers; shown itself more interested in short-term profit than growing (or even just maintaining) the popularity of the game.

Disenfranchised cricket viewers may wonder how this happened. Since pay TV was introduced, successive governments have supported anti-siphoning laws to ensure most Australians still had access to major sporting events on free-to-air TV.

Foxtel has done well from Mitch Fifield’s tenure as communications minister. Without calling for tenders he gave a grant of $30m to Foxtel to promote women’s sport. Last year he substantially reduced the number of sporting events covered by the anti-siphoning rules.

However the cricket matches now taken off free-to-air TV were still included, and so prima facie it seemed that the Cricket Australia-Seven-Foxtel deal broke the anti-siphoning regulations.

Fifield obfuscated. He said – correctly but irrelevantly – that free-to-air TV networks did not have to purchase events, although in this case all three commercial stations had bid. He and the head of the Seven network, Tim Worner, also said that once a network had bought rights, they could do as they wished with them, for example onsell them to Foxtel.

This is a rewriting of what had always been understood. Under the Fifield doctrine, whenever a free-to-air network and Foxtel cooperate, events can simply be taken off free-to-air TV, and any other sense of the public interest is eclipsed by their commercial convenience.

This change of attitude comes at a sensitive moment. Not only Foxtel, but streaming services are increasingly seeking sporting deals to make their product more attractive to potential subscribers.

As it seemed to me (and to many others) that the new agreement broke the anti-siphoning laws I asked the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to make a ruling. After some weeks, it emailed me that the ACMA has “concluded that it would not be in the public interest to proceed with an investigation of your complaint”.

It is my understanding that ACMA has every right to do this. In the past it had to proceed unless a complaint was deemed vexatious or trivial. Now it has the discretion not to. It does not have to give reasons and there is no avenue of appeal against its decision.

Nevertheless we live in a very strange world when a regulator decides that it is not in the public interest to adjudicate whether or not a law has been broken.

• Rodney Tiffen is emeritus professor in government and international relations at the University of Sydney