WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission is crafting conditions by which the merger between SBC Communications Inc. and Ameritech Corp. can be approved.
“Some problems cannot simply be solved by conditions but … conditions can mitigate some of the public-interest harms, conditions not directly related to the merger can add some public-interest benefits,” said Robert C. Atkinson, deputy bureau chief of the FCC’s Common Carrier Bureau.
These conditions are necessary because CCB staff tentatively concluded that the merger “flunked” the public-interest test, said CCB’s Tom Krattenmaker.
The two regional Bell operating companies said they will agree to merger conditions, but with caveats, including linking the conditions to identifiable harm caused by the merger, narrowly tailoring the conditions and making sure the process for negotiating conditions is fair, said Richard Hetke of Ameritech.
Hetke also described the negotiations that have taken place thus far, noting possible conditions include opening local markets.
The merger and its proposed conditions were debated in two days of public speeches last week at the FCC. More than 40 parties testified at the CCB forum. No commissioners attended the meeting. Indeed, an FCC spokeswoman said FCC Chairman William Kennard is not as negative about the merger as the staff, but “there are not three votes without some conditions [so] they are looking for a way to work it out.”
Kennard wrote a letter to the two companies last month asking for a 90-day negotiation period to craft conditions by which the merger of the two companies could be approved by the FCC.
The merger was approved last month by the Department of Justice with the only condition being that the companies divest themselves of overlapping wireless markets. Ameritech began this process when it sold some of its properties to GTE Corp. GTE last week filed for FCC approval of those license transfers.
