Newsmaxs spat with Fox over right-leaning viewers erupted into a high-stakes clash on Wednesday when the upstart right-wing cable news channel sued the legacy media outfit for allegedly violating antitrust laws, opening another front in the battle over the legality of tying and bundling.

In a lawsuit filed in Florida federal court, Newsmax alleges that Fox leverages its control of must-have channels to strongarm distributors into unfair terms. It points to a coordinated, behind-the-scenes campaign to suppress growth of the network thats inflated the price of news. But for Foxs anticompetitive behavior, Newsmax would have achieved greater pay TV distribution, seen its audience and ratings grow sooner, gained earlier critical mass for major advertisers and become, overall, a more valuable media property, states the complaint. Foxs campaign to stunt Newsmaxs business has delayed, for almost a decade, Newsmaxs growth in pay TV distribution.

The lawsuit capitalizes on increasing skepticism around bundling and tying and whether they constitute anticompetitive behavior meant to illegally maintain monopolies. It comes amid shifts in the live pay TV ecosystem thatve raised questions around whether antitrust law should play more of a role to promote competition.

For decades, Fox News has been the highest rated news channel in the U.S. In the first quarter of 2025, it averaged 2.2 million viewers on weekdays, more than double that of ESPN, according to the network. More than 13.6 million people tuned into its live coverage of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

After President Trumps 2020 election loss, upstart challengers like Newsmax and One America News looked to woo the MAGA base, some of whom were upset at Fox News after President Trump denounced the network as disloyal. Around that time, ratings plunged as viewers fled to rival right-leaning channels, though that didnt last long.

The lawsuit claims Fox News viewership is so big because the company kept out rivals.

In recent years, bundling requirements and tying have come under increasing scrutiny. But the cases in which theyve been considered are mostly in the context of a distributor suing a content provider or provider-distributor hybrid. Consider Fubos antitrust lawsuit to block a joint venture from media giants teaming up to pool together their sports licensing rights to form a new streaming service. At the heart of that dispute: Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. leveraging their control of must-have sports to force distributors into carrying dozens of pricey, unpopular channels as a take-it-or-leave it condition. These anticompetitive terms, it said, undermine its business model because they lead to increased costs for consumers, whore forced to pay for content they dont watch.

The court ultimately granted Fubos bid for a temporary order blocking the joint venture. It didnt rule on the legality of the longstanding bundling practices, which precedent suggests isnt illegal, but said that it served as crucial context, finding that it had been uniformly and systematically imposed on each distributor in the live pay TV industry except the joint venture. Its conclusion was grounded in the companies granting, for the first time ever, an exclusive license for unbundled sports programming.

Regulators new merger guidelines issued in 2023 also touched on the practice, stating that deals can violate antitrust law if they entrench a monopoly through bundled products.

For Newsmax, the issue of whether it was harmed by Foxs allegedly anticompetitive conduct will be an obstacle; Its much easier to make the case that distributors or consumers bore the cost of inflated news prices.

To get around this, Newsmax argues that Fox blocks competitors by coercing pay TV operators, threatening steep financial penalties if they add Newsmax to their basic tier. It points to so-called drag down provisions that modify the terms of traditional carriage deals. They essentially provide that a distributor must carry certain specific lesser-watched Fox channels, like Fox Business or Fox Sports 2, in the same basic tier that Newsmax is carried as a condition of carrying its highly-rated channels. The upshot: Distributors are subject to potentially tens of millions in additional license fees to Fox for the low-demand channels.

In effect, Fox at times refuses to license its indispensable sports, news, and entertainment channels unless the distributor either excludes rival right-leaning news networks entirely, restricts their distribution by placing them in little-watched tiers, or otherwise agrees to put them at a competitive disadvantage, writes Samuel J. Randall, a lawyer for Newsmax, in the complaint.

During renewal negotiations with Fubo, Newsmax was told that the streamer wouldnt include its channels after Fox imposed terms that deter the company from adding competitors without incurring penalties, according to the complaint. Newsmax faced delays from being carried on Sling TV for the same reason, it said. The network isnt currently included in either of the streamers base plan.

More broadly, Newsmax points to Foxs ability to make outsized demands from distributors due to the legacy media outfits dominance.

Fox has a history of leveraging the threat of blackouts, particularly of highly-rated live sports, in carriage negotiations. In 2019, it pulled its channels from DISH just before the start of the NFL season. A year later, a dispute with Roku imperiled the streamers rights for the Super Bowl. And in 2022, Fox threatened to blackout much of its programming one day before broadcasting the U.S.-Netherlands Wolrd Cup match.

By timing negotiations around buzzy games, Fox mobilized its sports audience as pressure campaign of sorts, according to the complaint. Newsmax argues that Fox has wielded a similar playbook to keep it from growing, bullying distributors from carrying its channels by conditioning carriage deals on them agreeing not to carry competing right-leaning news channels.

The lawsuit claims violations of Florida antitrust laws. It seeks treble damages and a court order barring Fox, which didnt immediately respond to a request for comment, from reaching anticompetitive deals.