[tc]

Look, I don't support subsidies either. Like with most US subsidies, the money was probably mostly wasted (but I'm sure it created jobs).

In all seriousness, telecom subsidies in the US mostly go to building out old-fashioned POTS lines and slow DSL into corn fields in the middle of nowhere. Don't blame the telecoms (except for the lobbying of the huge ones), that's what the grants specify.

AT&T has been spending big money supporting and astroturfing Internet Neutrality. If you don't understand why that would be, you don't understand the dynamics of the industry enough to know what is really going on. They aren't doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. This is the old struggle between the LECs and the cable franchises.

Internet Neutrality is a win for AT&T and the LECs because they already have a separate network (the time-division network) that doesn't rely on packet prioritization to deliver latency-sensitive media.