I'm no fan of AT&T. Their contract terms are garbage, and I feel lucky to love somewhere with options. But the article hasn't done a great job of explaining this headline. It makes it sound like these subsidies were designed to encourage AT&T to build out more fiber. But when I follow the links, they're about things like general tax cuts that were followed by layoffs or misrepresenting figures to benefit from a COVID program. Maybe I missed the part where there's something about building more fiber.
That's always been ATT's corporate messaging around anything financially beneficial to them -- we need this money because it will help us deliver better service to more people.
So it's not unjust to call bullshit when it turns out they aren't doing that, but are still keeping the money.
Yeah that's the vibe I got. More accurate headline: "ATT has been beneficiary of government action. ATT says it won't build new fiber to some dsl customers."
