https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210309/07331546389/sec-sues-att-leaking-info-to-analysts-to-cover-up-drooping-smartphone-sales.shtml

AT&T had a damn good ride during the Trump administration. Not only did it convince Trump regulators to effectively lobotomize the nation's top telecom regulator (right before a pandemic, no less), the company got billions in tax breaks for doing effectively nothing. And while the government did sue AT&T over the Time Warner merger, that had more to do with making Rupert Murdoch happy than making life hard on AT&T (AT&T won the lawsuit anyway). All told, AT&T nabbed billions upon billions in regulatory favors, merger approvals, and tax breaks. In exchange the US public saw...58,000 layoffs.

As another indication that AT&T's good times may be slowing down, the SEC filed suit against AT&T this week, accusing the telecom giant of leaking cell phone sales information to analysts and reporters to change their revenue forecasts for the company. This, in turn, let AT&T "beat" analysts' revenue forecasts in the first quarter of 2016, according to the SEC complaint (pdf). Technically, the SEC says AT&T violated the Securities Exchange Act and the SEC's Regulation "fair disclosure" rules, which "prohibit selective disclosures by issuers of material nonpublic information to securities analysts."