CenturyLink Defends Petition for Deregulation in Minnesota
Under fire from state agencies, CenturyLink defended the completeness of a petition for deregulation in each of its 108 exchanges in Minnesota. The ILEC asked the Public Utilities Commission June 30 to be regulated instead as a CLEC because it…
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serves less than 50 percent of households and competitors offer service to at least 60 percent of the households in each exchange. Under a deregulation process established by a recent state law, the PUC has 180 days to address the petition. But in Aug. 15 comments in docket 16-496, the Minnesota Attorney General and the state Department of Commerce separately said CenturyLink didn’t provide enough information to make a decision. They asked for more information showing competition for each local service offered in each exchange, evidence the telco lost customers to competitors over at least the past five years, and a demonstration that competition data it filed is accurate. In a reply Monday, CenturyLink said its petition is complete. "The Agencies’ arguments misread the relevant statute, confuse the distinction between completeness and sufficiency, and should be summarily rejected,” it said. “The statute clearly does not contemplate that all issues … must be unequivocally resolved before a petition is deemed complete. If that were the case, there would be no need for the 180 day review period.” The law allows the PUC to seek more information from the petitioner, but the PUC can’t reject a petition as incomplete for “failure to include information the petitioner was never notified was necessary," the telco said. The state agencies disagreed. “In essence, a carrier filing a petition under this statute must ‘show its work’ in the initial filing in order to have a complete petition for review,” the AG commented Monday. “CenturyLink has not shown its work. As a result, any analysis of the merits of the petition is both premature and impossible, given the lack of detail provided in the petition.” The petition is incomplete, but the PUC should keep the docket open so CenturyLink can file additional information, the department replied. The information sought by the state agencies “is very detailed, and that’s unlike most of the other states that have deregulated,” National Regulatory Research Institute Principal Sherry Lichtenberg emailed us. NRRI is the research arm of NARUC. In most former AT&T states, for example, ILECs could “elect” to have reduced regulation because the laws were predicated on the idea that competition exists, she said. “The Minnesota law seems to be the first that will require such detailed information.”