https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200909/07395345273/over-politico-att-monopoly-gives-tips-fixing-broadband-problem-it-spent-thirty-years-creating.shtml
from excerpt:
This one's a real laugher if you know AT&T's history. For the better part of the last generation AT&T has received a fountain of taxpayer cash in exchange for fiber it never fully deploys. AT&T spent much of the aughts under-investing in fiber despite rampant deregulation that was supposed to incentivize it to do so. It just received a $42 billion tax cut from the Trump administration that resulted in more than 41,000 layoffs and a $3 billion CAPEX reduction for 2020. AT&T's running a 30-year con in which it takes taxpayer dollars, pockets the lion's share of it, under-deploys broadband, then tries to obfuscate the results.
AT&T just spent $150 billion on an array of terrible mergers that saddled the company in an ocean of debt and resulted in customers leaving in droves. Between tax breaks, subsidies, and the gutting of FCC consumer protections like net neutrality and privacy, it's almost impossible to calculate the amount of taxpayer assistance AT&T has received in the last decade alone. In fact, the only reason Stankey is even CEO is because the last CEO got driven out of town for wasting money on misguided ideas. Yet here we have AT&T giving advice on what is or isn't "cost prohibitive."
What's AT&T and Stankey really up to here? With stories in the press about kids having to squat outside of Taco Bell just to get online for class, AT&T's policy guys know we're likely to see new legislation in the next year to help bridge the digital divide. AT&T would prefer that legislation fixate on throwing billions in additional subsidies at monopolies like AT&T, instead of tackling the real cause of U.S. broadband mediocrity: rampant state and federal corruption, or the monopolization that results from timid policymakers fecklessly bending the policy knee to monopolistic telecom giants for the better part of a generation.