To make matters worse, TV prompter scripts are written for the news anchors, not the public. This means they were performing a service they didn't have to perform. Now, they have to continue that level of captioning, but ENR won't count any more. That means what the stations were getting free from their newsroom computers will now cost them money, and stations that didn't caption in 1997 won't have to spend that money. CBS says that this amounts to punishing the stations for providing captions they didn't have to provide.
Stations have more choices today than they did years ago.
It used to be that if a TV station wanted to caption its local news, they had to find a local captioner and pay whatever that captioner chose to charge. Now, many of the big national captioning firms offer local captioning services, and prices have stabilized. There's no question that realtime captions are better. The FCC acknowledged it in the ruling that disallows ENR captioning for many stations, and CBS acknowledged it in their complaint. The FCC says that ENR isn't good enough.