As of last Monday, Verizon and Frontier really only needed regulatory approval from the FCC, Illinois and West Virginia to move forward on their $8.5 billion transfer of millions of DSL and landline customers from Verizon to Frontier across fourteen states. Across every state, consumer advocates have warned that Frontier will be taking on so much debt from the deal that they may struggle with support -- much less actually upgrading the network. State regulators continue to approve the deal anyway.

But opposition has been particularly fierce by unions and consumer advocates in West Virginia and Illinois. In West Virginia, unions have taken aim at the financial tricks Verizon uses to offload these networks tax free, obviously concerned that the Frontier deal will result in collapse, just like similar Verizon deals with Hawaiian Telcom and Fairpoint. In Illinois, a Judge recently issued a lengthy study highlighting how the deal was really only good for Verizon, and would "diminish Frontier’s ability to perform its duties to provide adequate, reliable, efficient, safe and least-cost public utility service."

But Verizon lobbyists are powerful and deep-pocketed, and last week the company managed to get the Governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, to personally repeat telco talking points about the benefits of the deal in order to grease the regulatory approval process. Not too surprisingly, Quinn completely contradicted the findings of earlier state studies, telling state regulators the deal needed to move forward for the sake of jobs and broadband expansion:Except the study Quinn is completely ignoring found (and previous Verizon deals of this kind clearly highlight) that Frontier will be taking on so much debt from the transaction, real broadband expansion and network upgrades probably won't be coming any time soon. If "expansion represents job creation" as Quinn attests, Illinois won't be seeing much job growth from the deal.

It's not necessarily that the deal needs to be blocked (given Verizon has no interest in upgrading these markets), but there's an opportunity for some meaningful conditions -- assuming you could find any state regulator willing to enforce telecom merger conditions once created. Quinn could have helped by requiring that Verizon sell the state networks normally (thereby paying taxes and limiting Frontier's debt obligation), but that would require standing up to Verizon, which no politician is willing to do.

Meanwhile, Frontier has issued a statement saying they unsurprisingly agree with Quinn and announcing that Illinois regulators have unanimously approved the transaction. The only obstacles to the deal now are the state of West Virginia and the FCC, both of which shouldn't be too hard for Verizon to bull rush with a little elbow grease and a little extra lobbying cash. As for the 600,000 Illinois customers this deal impacts, hopefully they like the idea of $250 a month DSL.