They could have just tweeted it.
Sean Spicer has a new gig, ghostwriting legal briefs for CenturyLink. There’s no other way to read CenturyLink’s latest filing with the California Public Utilities Commission. It’s a whingeing, self-contradictory and occasionally bitter reply to the California Emerging Technology Fund’s (CETF) continued opposition to CenturyLink’s proposed purchase of Level 3 Communications.
CETF’s objections weren’t particularly on point – they were more concerned with spending CenturyLink’s money than maintaining a competitive fiber market in California – so it’s no surprise that the rebuttal skids and spins like a Lada sedan in a Moscow ice storm. It collides with itself, jabbing a finger toward a woolly promise to spend big on California infrastructure and work with CETF and others to “identify projects for such investment”, but quibbling in the fine print of a footnote that those are merely “possible locations”.
On the central question before the CPUC – will the transaction cripple wholesale fiber competition in California? – CenturyLink offers facts and alternative facts. It first says, okay, so we’re taking out a competitor…
The instant transaction involves the transfer of control at the parent level of the Level 3 Operating Entities that provide services to a (limited) number of wholesale and enterprise customers only. The transfer is to CenturyLink, the parent company of a non- dominant carrier in California that also provides competitive services to wholesale and enterprise customers.
But, it continues, fewer competitors doesn’t mean less competition…
By any measure, the Level 3 Operating Entities, even when combined with the CenturyLink Operating Entities, will remain a non-dominant competitive provider without any particular market power in any relevant telecommunications market (e.g., backhaul, long haul, enterprise, etc.).
Nonsense.
Both have considerable market power now, as two of the four major long haul fiber owners on key California routes, and Level 3 is the only independent operator. Rolling it into the monopoly business model embraced by AT&T and Verizon – the other two – and by CenturyLink will only add to the wholesale fiber crunch identified by the CPUC as a root cause of California’s “highly concentrated” residential broadband market.
The CPUC needs to separate truth from fiction, and base its decision on broadband market realities and not on corporate bluster or well-meaning wishful thinking.
CenturyLink and Level 3 joint reply to CETF comments, 25 July 2017
CETF comments on CenturyLink purchase of Level 3, 21 July 2017