Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.
To avoid another repeated thread, just read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.
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.