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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>AT&T is already making money hand over fist on you,

AT&T doesn't make that much money. Their profit margin is consistently around 10% which is pretty much dead on average for the S&P 500. Half of what Apple does and about 1/3 of Facebook.

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Amazon's profit margin is small, but only a fool would say they aren't making money hand over fist. Profit isn't the only measure of 'making money'.

ATT's revenue was $181B in 2019.

You could looks at return on capital, but AT&T isn’t that great in that measurement either.

It makes a pretty fair return in a very large investment. They certainly work for their money.

All the more impressive when they're also one of the better dividend stocks out there.

Wouldn’t it be better to measure $profit per customer. 10% margin doesn’t sound like much, but as you increase costs with anticompetitive measures like having the government sell you exclusive access to infrastructure related resources, that 10% increases in value.

Ex: I’d rather pay $100 to an ISP making 20% margin than $200 to an ISP making 10% margin.

>Ex: I’d rather pay $100 to an ISP making 20% margin than $200 to an ISP making 10% margin.

But you can't because it costs $180 to provide the service. If it could be provided cheaper they'd keep charging you $200 and pocket the extra profit.

If anticompetitive factors are at play that simultaneously increase costs while reducing competition then removing those means it would be cheaper. Spectrum auctions for mobile or exclusive rights of way for wireline are examples of this. The massive duopoly providers don’t care about the exorbitant cost of those because they just pass it along to the customer who has to accept it because there’s no competition.

Those kinds of barriers to entry are a huge benefit to the awful incumbents we have to tolerate.

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