This hour (as I’m writing this), Qwest Field (home of the Seahawks and Sounders FC) has officially been rechristened CenturyLink Field, after the telecom giant that took over the mourned-by-nobody Qwest.

It’s as good an official date as any to mark the end of the last of the Baby Bells, the seven regional landline phone companies created with the fed-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. (The other six re-merged into Verizon and “the New AT&T.”)

Pacific Northwest Bell was one of three old AT&T units spun off as “US West.” It was a phone company, run by phone company people, as the communications world began to change all around it. All was fine and dull for a decade and a half.

Then came Phillip Anschutz. I’ve mentioned the California mogul before here, principally in connection with his link to local anti-evolution advocates and to his ownership of the Examiner.com content-mill sites (which rely on “news” stories from unpaid writers).

Anschutz had bought the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1996, just so he could lay fiber-optic phone and data lines across its rights of way. When he sold off SP to the Union Pacific, he attained permission to lay lines along UP’s rights of way as well. Since this was the digital age, these lines could transmit voice, video, and data; though Qwest’s original principal business was long-distance phone service.

To further his business-to-business communications plans, Anschutz bought US West in 2000. Not long after came the complaints by local phone customers. Qwest was “slamming” home users, switching their long distance service to its own subsidiary without permission. Qwest telemarketed like crazy, calling customers at all hours to repeatedly offer its (weak, costly) cell phone add-on plans. Qwest underfunded its regulated landline business, to the point that it couldn’t install phone lines in new subdivisions on time. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, Qwest didn’t get into the cable TV business.

(On the plus side, Qwest refused to go along when the Bush-era National Security Agency asked phone companies to hand over records of everybody’s phone calls, for wiretapping purposes.)

Now, Qwest’s data, landline-voice, and business telecommunications services are owned by the company formerly known as Central Telephone, then Century Telephone (or “CenturyTel”). As an acquirer of other companies’ landline territories, CenturyLink already covered more square miles in Washington and Oregon than Qwest had serviced.

Oh, and some of us still remember another “Qwest”—the old record label run by ex-Seattleite Quincy Jones. Jones has announced he’s using the name again, now that nobody else is.