On May 25, 2026, the Special Knesset Committee on the Communications Bill — chaired by Likud MK Galit Distel-Atbaryan — voted 7-6 to split Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi's media overhaul into two separate tracks. The first track, now advancing toward second and third readings, restructures Israel's broadcasting oversight: it consolidates the Second Authority for Television and Radio and the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting into a single Ministry-housed regulator, sets local-production and financial requirements for content providers, and codifies distribution rules for the public broadcaster KAN and the Knesset Channel. The second, postponed track was the politically loaded one — registration obligations on news providers, an enforcement regime, prohibited-broadcast clauses, and investment obligations on international streaming platforms. The committee's own legal advisers and Knesset Legal Adviser Sagit Afik opposed the procedural split, with Afik continuing to argue that the entire package belongs in the Economic Affairs Committee, not in a coalition-built special panel (Jerusalem Post).
The Steelman: Israel's Dual Regulator Really Is Outdated
The case for restructuring is genuine. Israel today licenses broadcasting through two analog-era bodies that predate Netflix by decades, and news divisions sit under a separate licensing track whose original purpose — insulating newsrooms from owner pressure — has eroded as channels consolidate and viewing migrates to streaming. The Israel Democracy Institute's explainer acknowledges that a unified regulator could, in principle, reduce duplication and simplify market entry for new content businesses (IDI). A pro-innovation policy stance should welcome the death of regulatory silos that punish multi-platform startups for crossing arbitrary analog/digital lines.
The procedural split, taken on its own merits, is also defensible. Splitting the broadcasting plumbing from the contested news-and-streamer track lets the legislature work the easier reform first and gives the harder one room for deliberation. That is exactly what Karhi's critics have been demanding for months: more time, more hearings, fewer omnibus shortcuts.
What the Steelman Misses
The problem is what the advancing track actually does to regulator independence. Under the bill as drafted, the new authority's members are chosen by the Communications Minister, with no independence shield comparable to what the Second Authority enjoys today. The IDI analysis flags that the bill omits prior statutory language requiring the regulator be "free of any political influence," and gives the Ministry real-time access to viewer-data from all broadcast and streaming services — a database whose dual-use potential should worry anyone, regardless of which coalition holds the keys (IDI). Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, in a February 3, 2026 opinion urging the High Court of Justice to convene an urgent hearing, called the bill a "real concern of severe harm to freedom of expression" and faulted the government for cutting short inter-ministerial review once constitutional objections surfaced (Jerusalem Post).
Layered on top: the bill carves Channel 14, a right-wing channel aligned with the coalition, out of a content-sharing requirement worth millions, and the Knesset Legal Adviser had to be physically ejected with her staff from a prior committee session after being barred from speaking. Whatever one thinks of the substantive reform, those are not the hallmarks of legislation built to last past the next election.
The Streamer Levy — Postponed, Not Killed
The postponed second track contains the bill's most market-distorting provision: a requirement that international streamers earning more than NIS 40 million in annual Israeli revenue invest 6.5% of that revenue in local content. Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and HBO Max would have been on the hook (CTech). Karhi confirmed in March 2026 that Prime Minister Netanyahu removed the clause after a request from US President Donald Trump, framing it as part of trade negotiations (The Media Line). Industry insiders estimated Israeli production funding could fall by roughly 30% if the levy disappears entirely.
For a pro-innovation publication, the right answer to that levy was always to drop it — not because Washington asked, but because cultural-investment quotas on streamers are a protectionist subsidy disguised as policy. They raise consumer prices, distort content investment away from quality toward quota compliance, and rest on a fiction that streaming displaces local production rather than expanding the addressable market for it. The EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive has spent six years showing how brittle these obligations get once platforms route content investment to comply with the letter rather than the spirit. Postponing this track is a quiet win — even if the politics around it are ugly.
The Trade That Just Got Locked In
The net effect of the 7-6 split is a trade: Israel gets a politicized broadcasting regulator now, in exchange for parking the streamer levy fight. Pro-speech and pro-innovation voices should resist both halves separately. On the regulator, the answer is straightforward: independent appointments, a statutory political-independence clause restored, and viewer-data held by an autonomous body rather than the Ministry. On the streamer side, the right outcome is to formally kill the 6.5% levy on its merits in any future round, not to let it lie dormant as leverage. A press freedom alert issued by EU SEE in December 2025 already cited the AG's warning that the reform "could undermine the ability of Israel's free press to fulfill its essential role" (EU SEE) — a warning that should travel with the broadcasting track, not stay parked with the postponed news track.