A federal judge is putting on hold a new Maine law that would allow cable television customers to subscribe a la carte to individual channels and avoid programming bundles they don’t want.
U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Torresen granted a temporary injunction to Comcast and other challengers on Friday. She found that the companies were likely to prevail on their claim that the law violates their rights of editorial control under the First Amendment.
Torresen noted that while that was a probable outcome of the case, the evidence wasn’t sufficiently developed to throw the law out altogether, and she ordered a trial.
State Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos, an independent from Friendship who authored the bill, says the judge is putting corporate free speech ahead of consumers' free choice.
This story has been corrected to note that Rep. Jeffrey Evangelos is from Friendship, not Freedom.