Tonight, Cowboys and Cardinals fans who rely on YouTube TV for their local ABC channel will be drowning their sorrows in leftover Halloween candy, thanks to Big Tech’s heavy hand in deciding what viewers can and cannot watch.

If you subscribe to Google’s YouTube TV, you already know that ABC affiliate stations are off the air. It’s been a weekend of disruption for college football fans across the country. Why? Because Google doesn’t want to fairly compensate ABC stations for this programming, and the Big Tech giant’s market power gives it enormous control over consumers’ access to entertainment, information and news.

That leaves local ABC stations – that provide important news, emergency information, entertainment and live sports – and their millions of viewers in the lurch and at the mercy of a tech behemoth that pulls in hundreds of BILLIONs in annual revenue.

This is déjà vu for YouTube TV subscribers, who nearly lost access to NBC stations last month and still don’t have access to Univision stations.

For more than 100 years, local stations have been on the ground in their communities, investing in journalists, building trusted newsrooms and delivering life-saving information during emergencies. Big Tech companies dwarf these local stations, and have taken broadcasters’ original reporting and used it to grow their empires without compensation.

It is a familiar playbook: build enormous scale, marginalize competitors and then dictate the terms. Now, tech giants are deciding not only which local stories get surfaced online but whether local stations even appear on your TV screen.

It is time to level the playing field. Because when local broadcasters are sidelined, it is not just sports fans who lose. It is every community that depends on fact-based reporting, public safety alerts and a shared civic connection. It’s time for Washington to modernize broadcast ownership rules and stop giving Big Tech the unfair advantage to control what you see and hear. Take action before it’s too late.