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To avoid another repeated thread, just read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 I just realized th

• rayiner 6y ago
  Whatever conclusions you reach from the points made in that thread, there is an important additional point here. That thread is talking about telephone companies. OP is talking about cable. We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place. I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.