Charter, Cox at Odds with Calif. Advocacy Groups on Merger Conditions
The state’s telecom regulator is set to vote on the $34.5 billion deal this week at its Aug. 13 meeting
Aug. 10, 2026 – Charter and Cox Communications want California regulators to approve their $34.5 billion merger with fewer strings attached than consumer advocates.
The California Public Utilities Commission is set to vote on approving the deal at its Aug. 13 meeting. Unusually for recent telecom mergers, the agency will have two proposed decisions to choose from.
One, from the CPUC Administrative Law Judge Jamie Ormond, who has been overseeing the case, would go further than the settlement agreements the companies reached with two consumer groups. It would require more rural deployment and low-income service commitments over longer periods of time.
The other, from the office of CPUC Commissioner Matthew Baker, would accept those two settlements as-is, and impose many fewer extra conditions.
In July 29 and Aug. 3 filing with the agency, the companies said they preferred Baker’s option.
Ormond’s proposed decision “imposes unconditional, infeasible buildout mandates that drastically expand” what the companies agreed to, attorneys Margaret Tobias and Zeb Zankel wrote.
Charter had agreed to spend $275 million upgrading its new California footprint to gigabit speeds. Ormond’s proposal would simply require the company’s entire in-state footprint to be upgraded, in addition to 6,000 new locations Charter would have to deploy to.
The companies wanted the new deployment requirement struck, arguing that with California’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program awards approved it would be moot.
The Utility Reform Network, a California advocacy group that did not settle and has opposed the deal, wanted the CPUC to go even further. The group generally supported the agency adopting Ormond’s proposal over Baker’s, as did another set of in-state advocacy groups like Digital Equity Los Angeles.
TURN attorney Alexandra Green wrote that the number appeared to come from a filing in which Charter said there were 6,000 un- or underserved locations in its footprint, but that the number should be increased to account for the addition of Cox locations.
Ormond would also extend Charter’s low-income agreements — providing a $20 per month broadband plan and participation in the state’s low-income broadband subsidy, among other things — by years more than the companies and advocacy groups settled on.
The companies said there was no reason for that, and that its five-year commitments lined up with the Verizon-Frontier merger approved in the state last year.
CalAdvocates, the consumer advocacy office housed within the CPUC that reached a settlement with the companies, didn’t file comments but posted a blog defending its settlement terms and urging the CPUC to adopt them as written.
Modifying settlements?
The California Emerging Technology Fund, a nonprofit that reached a settlement agreement with the companies, also supported Baker’s proposal.
It argued the CPUC didn’t have the authority to alter the terms of existing settlement agreements before adopting them.
“Bottom-line, a settlement agreement requires the assent of its parties,” CETF CEO Sunne Wright McPeak wrote.
In a filing last month, Charter and Cox argued it was unprecedented for the CPUC to combine two settlement agreements into one containing terms not present in either individual agreement.
“Joint Applicants are not aware of any prior instance in which the Commission, or a reviewing court, has construed” agency rules “as authority to create the new, consolidated ALJ’s Proposed Joint Settlement that no party negotiated or executed,” Zankel and Tobias wrote.
TURN and other advocacy groups argued the agency should make the terms of Ormond’s joint settlement into conditions of the agency’s approval of the deal.
Green wrote that if the CPUC approved Ormond’s decision, there was a chance that the companies and settling advocates would simply not agree to the joint settlement terms, leaving them void.
Recent meetings
Representatives from Charter, CETF, and TURN have been pressing their cae with CPUC staff in recent days.
Charter executives met with CPUC staff on Aug. 4 to argue for small changes to Baker’s proposed decision, including clarifying a five-year duration for several conditions and a “phase-in period” for offering 72-hour battery backup.
McPeak met with staff from multiple commissioner offices last week to defend CETF’s settlement agreement and urge the adoption of Baker’s proposal.
Green and Ryan Johnston, another TURN regulatory attorney, also met with CPUC officials to push for Ormond’s plan. They reiterated that the joint settlement terms should be made merger conditions to ensure they would be executed if the Ormond proposal were approved.
