One year ago today, Comcast announced it had signed an agreement to buy Time Warner Cable for $45.2 billion, merging the nation's two largest cable companies. At the time, Comcast said it expected to get all necessary government approvals and close the transaction by the end of 2014.

Further Reading Critic of massive mergers to help FCC review Comcast and AT&T deals

Six weeks into 2015, the merger is still facing scrutiny, and it isn't clear whether Comcast, already the biggest home Internet provider in the US, will be allowed to expand its empire. Comcast has suffered a year's worth of bad publicity as wronged customers aired their many grievances, often with recordings to show how poorly Comcast employees treat subscribers.

"I believe the customer service stories provide the political cover that the higher-up officials at the agencies need to do the right thing," Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer of advocacy group Public Knowledge told Ars. (Public Knowledge has opposed the deal in filings with the FCC.)

"On the substantive arguments, I think opponents of the deal have made their case, and that case is convincing," Bergmayer continued. "But Comcast's PR problems in part make it harder to override those substantive concerns or try to fix them with a grab bag of conditions."

The Federal Communications Commission has given no indication as to whether it will approve the merger, with or without conditions. But FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made a series of proposals in other proceedings that angered Comcast and other Internet providers. Wheeler has shown himself to be a far bigger skeptic of telecommunications companies than one might have guessed, given that he used to be a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries.

Wheeler's Democratic majority last month redefined broadband to include only service of at least 25Mbps download speeds and 3Mbps uploads. This move highlighted just how much Comcast dominates the country at higher Internet speeds. Under the new definition, Comcast has a 56 percent national broadband market share.

On February 26, Wheeler is scheduled to hold two more votes that will likely anger Comcast. In one, the FCC is expected to strike down state laws that make it harder for municipal broadband networks to compete against private Internet providers. In the other, the FCC will likely reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier service in order to impose net neutrality rules.

The commission's staff dedicated to reviewing the merger has been hard at work all along, but getting those two big votes off the table will give the chairman's office more time to focus on Comcast.

Stopping the clock

The FCC has a 180-day clock for reviewing mergers. The clock started later than Comcast initially expected, because it took a while to figure out plans for divesting 3.9 million customers in a related deal that will give Charter some customers and create a new spinoff company. The clock started July 10, 2014 and was stopped three times because of difficulties obtaining documents from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and content providers whose programming is aired by the cable companies. This isn't unusual; the clock was stopped twice during the review of Comcast's NBCUniversal purchase that closed in 2011.

The clock for Comcast/TWC is now scheduled to expire March 30, but the FCC doesn't have to make a decision then. The commission's statutory obligation to determine whether the merger serves the public interest takes precedence over the informal timeline, an FCC spokesperson explained.

"End of March/early April is most likely [for a decision] though not certain," Bergmayer said.

The FCC is also reviewing AT&T's proposed acquisition of DirecTV, with that clock scheduled to expire a few days after the Comcast/TWC one.

It's not just the FCC, either. The Department of Justice is examining the deal for antitrust violations and could sue in federal court to block it. DOJ spokespeople did not respond to a query from Ars this week.

Comcast also has to obtain permission from states and municipalities whose cable providers would change as a result of the deal. More than 90 percent of municipalities have provided their blessing, Comcast told Ars, though some gave the company a hard time before doing so. Among states, New York and California are the big ones. The deal has inspired protests in each state and regulators have not yet made a decision. These state processes often run parallel to the FCC's, but it's not clear whether they will conclude before or after the federal probe, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars.

The merger isn’t about reducing local cable competition

Comcast's TWC deal is in some ways simpler than its NBC buy, but in others more complicated, the Comcast spokesperson said. While Comcast/NBC brought up vertical integration issues between the cable company and a massive content provider, Comcast and TWC is a horizontal merger joining two companies providing the same services.

The FCC's non-merger votes shouldn't necessarily impact the analysis of Comcast/Time Warner Cable. For example, Comcast already faces net neutrality rules that were imposed upon its NBCUniversal merger, so the FCC's new net neutrality rules will affect Comcast less than other providers. Many of the potential harms described by merger opponents aren't forbidden by net neutrality rules, which focus on blocking or throttling of online traffic.

Comcast has argued that the merger shouldn't be opposed because it doesn't compete against Time Warner Cable for TV and Internet customers in any given city or town. Cable companies, especially the big incumbents, have generally not bothered to overbuild each other, since it's more profitable to dominate each city and town they operate in.

Despite not reducing choice for TV and Internet subscribers, the merger raises other concerns. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are the most hated companies in their industries, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and it isn't clear how giving Comcast more subscribers will solve its well-documented customer service failures.

Anti-merger groups have argued that a bigger Comcast would have more power to take a hard line against small programmers in carriage negotiations, to raise the cost of NBC content and other programming it owns and demand interconnection payments from companies like Netflix. Comcast could also impose data caps on TWC customers who don't face such limits today, while increasing its control over the set-top box market. By adding to the number of regional sports networks it owns, Comcast could also prevent customers from watching local sports teams online without buying a cable TV subscription.

Wheeler already helped doom Sprint's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile before a deal could be signed, and he celebrated its collapse. After that, and after watching Wheeler publicly mock Comcast's opposition to redefining broadband and then lead a vote that went against Comcast's wishes, it would not be surprising to see the chairman put a stop to Comcast/Time Warner Cable.