AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Lumen all get hammered after lead-cable reports.

AT&T’s stock price hit a 29-year low on Friday and continued to sink today as investors fled telecom stocks on reports that cleanups of lead-covered telephone cables could cost the industry tens of billions of dollars.

  • EnderWi99in@kbin.social
    32·
    1 year ago

    You know companies need to exist so you can have and do nearly everything you rely on in your life right? Unless you want the state to control all means of production, which I would not recommend, there is a lane where corporations do need to exist and you’re absolutely free to invest in their businesses (or not) just like everyone else.

    • ghostinthessh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      ISPs and telecoms are natural monopolies. The state owning them would probably improve the options many people have access to. Also state owned does not have to mean it is owned by a federal or even state government. It can be owned by smaller units of organization. Furthermore there can be vendoring out of the parts that a private market is more competitive for (such as equipment).

    • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Utilities, in particular, can and often should be owned by municipalities or states. For every example of an inefficiently-run state-owned enterprise, there’s a dozen boring, local, publicly-owned utilities that are run as well or better than private companies.

      The clusterfucks tend to be at the national level where there’s no real oversight. A corrupt president might be able to treat a utility as a slush fund or jobs program and get away with it but a mayor or county executive just doesn’t have the juice to be flagrantly corrupt without someone investigating.