Your local sports teams probably got a lot of your public resources to get their arena built.

But you might be shut out from watching those games on TV just based on who provides your pay-TV service. If you live in New York, Philadelphia, or San Diego, for example, you can watch some of your local teams on TV in beautiful High Definition, but only if you subscribe to cable. If you subscribe to satellite or get TV from your phone company or a new provider, you’re probably out of luck. That’s because your cable company either owns the team, owns the venue, owns the network carrying the games, or some combination of all these things. So the cable company wants you to pay it to see the games, and not pay any of its competitors.

You might think that there ought to be a law designed to prohibit that kind of anti-competitive behavior. There is. In 1992, Congress passed a federal statute that requires cable companies to sell the programming that they own to their competitors on fair terms. 47 U.S.C. 548. By making that programming available to cable’s competitors, Congress helped bring in a new age of competition against cable from satellite, phone companies, even small startups.

There’s just one problem: the law has a loophole. A cable company can get around this requirement to sell its programming to its competitors if it uses a certain kind of technology to deliver its signal. Big cable has made sure that this loophole stays in federal law.

So you can guess how this story ends: big cable companies use that loophole to keep your local sports programming away from you, unless you sign up for their service. It doesn’t matter if you think cable is too expensive, or if you just hate your cable company and want something different, or even that your tax dollars went to help build that stadium where the team plays. You’re out of luck, and federal law does nothing to help you.

Final score: sports and cable industries win, sports fans lose.