I think one very likely cause for telecoms being vehemently against privacy legislation is that both AT&T and Verizon are trying very hard to enter the adtech m

I think one very likely cause for telecoms being vehemently against privacy legislation is that both AT&T and Verizon are trying very hard to enter the adtech market. They are hoping that first party customer data combined with more traditional third party cookie data will give them a competitive edge, but it'll only happen if they are allowed to use all of that data in the first place. I used to work in ad tech, and this kind of stuff was responsible for my steady disillusionment with advertising as an industry. While the argument could be made that marketing/advertising can be benign, it's quite obvious (once you know where to look) that it creates all sorts of perverse societal incentives that work against individual citizens' interests.