FCC Waiting to Hear From CenturyLink, Qwest on Merger Conditions
The FCC is waiting to hear from CenturyLink and Qwest about the kinds of conditions they would accept for approval of their deal, commission officials told us. Approval is not “imminent,” but the fact-finding has wrapped up, the officials said. The deal is reaching “the home stretch,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast wrote Friday, but a government shutdown remains “a threat.” She added, “We expect the FCC will impose duties” on the combined company “in certain areas -- including wholesale performance and broadband deployment/adoption, some of which could resemble previous conditions on CenturyLink-Embarq and Frontier-Verizon -- with additional obligations possible, but not as onerous as critics want."
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CenturyLink’s acquisition of Qwest has been approved by all but four states involved, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota. The buyer is confident and has set an April 1 goal for final approval. The companies fully expect to have to comply with broadband deployment conditions, but are waiting for the FCC to lay out other conditions, a company official told us this week. “Further … concessions could speed the process, but extensive wrangling over final conditions -- or even a congressional fiscal impasse and federal government shutdown -- could slow it,” Arbogast wrote.
The FCC is considering net neutrality obligations similar to those imposed on the Comcast-NBCU deal and is considering whether to ask the merged company to give up Universal Service Fund money, commission officials and a public interest advocate told us. The acquisition still faces resistance from CLECs including Paetec, which wants guarantees that the combined company won’t discard Qwest’s legacy operating system for at least three years. Negotiations among the companies continue but have not progressed, officials of each told us.