A year after it was announced, Comcast’s audacious acquisition of Time Warner Cable remains in limbo as Washington regulators scrutinize the deal. No surprise there. After all, the $45 billion merger would consolidate an already-concentrated industry, uniting the two largest cable operators in the United States.
But in recent weeks, the air of inevitability around the deal has dissipated. With the Federal Communications Commission proposing stringent new rules to govern the Internet, analysts have grown more skeptical about the acquisition being approved. Investors began betting against the combination late last month, with shares of both companies falling sharply before recovering last week.
“The prospects for the deal, while they’re still not bad, have continued to go down,” said Kevin Werbach, a former F.C.C. counsel and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Advisers to both companies acknowledge that passing regulatory muster is far from certain. Yet David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, expressed confidence that the merger would still be approved but acknowledged that the outcome was hard to handicap.
“This is a bit of a black-box process,” he said. “You don’t really know what’s going on under the surface.”
In Washington, officials at the Justice Department and F.C.C. are poring over data to decide whether to approve the deal, and what if any concessions the companies must make to satisfy antitrust laws. The review continues even as Comcast and Time Warner Cable are completing the minutiae of their planned merger.
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Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on 02/09/2015, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Year Later, Cable Giants’ Merger Is Still Up in the Air.
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