Your cable TV bill keeps rising, but instead of working together to reduce rates, cable companies and TV networks are fighting over who's to blame.

A consortium representing small cable providers traded criticism this week with a group that represents local broadcasters. The American Cable Association (ACA), which represents nearly 850 small and medium-sized video, broadband, and phone service providers, got things started by asking the Federal Communications Commission "to combat surging programming costs."

"If current trends continue, already high video programming fees will continue to escalate, causing the margins from traditional pay-TV service for smaller cable operators to shrink and then dry up within five years," ACA CEO Matthew Polka said. "The FCC must use its power to restore some semblance of sanity to the out-of-control video content market or broadband investment will suffer." The ACA argues that programming costs are so high that they inhibit investment in broadband infrastructure. Though the amount consumers pay is going up each year, the increases aren't enough to cover the increased programming fees, the ACA says.

A group called TVFreedom.org that represents local network affiliates and other broadcasters fired back, issuing a statement that said, “The pay-TV house of cards is built on diversionary tactics aimed at hiding their own greed. The inconvenient truth is that higher cable rates are the direct result of excessive cable network programming fees and exorbitantly high equipment rental charges."

Both groups made specific points about how the cost of programming hurts consumers. The ACA wants the government to impose new rules on retransmission consent agreements, in which cable operators pay broadcast stations for the right to air their channels. When these negotiations fail, TV channels and even online content can be denied to consumers. This happened in 2013 during a dispute between CBS and Time Warner Cable.

The ACA urged the FCC to "[r]eform retransmission consent by adopting a rule mandating that broadcasters and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) continue to offer a broadcast station's signal to consumers after an existing retransmission consent agreement expires and while the terms of a new agreement are pending resolution of a dispute. ACA also called on the FCC to deem the practice of online blocking video content by a broadcast station to be a per se violation of the retransmission consent good faith rules."

TVFreedom objected to this characterization, saying that "ACA propagates the myth that retransmission consent fees paid to broadcasters cause higher cable bills, yet these fees account for less than 10 percent of a subscriber's monthly bill. ACA should come clean with customers and promote greater accountability regarding abusive pay-TV charges and truth-in-billing practices."

There is some common ground between the ACA and TVFreedom, however. Both say consumers are being harmed by the high cost of local sports programming offered by regional sports networks (RSNs), many of which are owned by large cable companies. TVFreedom offered this chart to show how retransmission fees compare to RSNs and other costs:

The ACA is mad about RSN fees as well. Large cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable own numerous regional sports networks and charge smaller cable companies for the right to air the networks' programming, often in bulk negotiations with buying groups that represent many small cable operators. The ACA says the FCC should let these buying groups lodge complaints "against a cable-affiliated programmer that imposes discriminatory rates, terms, and conditions."

These buying groups should get the same volume discounts from cable-affiliated programmers that are offered to the bigger pay-TV providers, the ACA says. The ACA also wants the FCC to "limit forced program bundling," which results in consumers buying tons of channels they don't want to get the few that they do watch. But while Canadian regulators plan to require a la carte channel subscriptions, efforts to require the same in the US have stalled.