At least two levels of "sinister". One level is a lot of investors (who include employees and their retirements) and creditors getting the shaft, maybe because of accounting fraud and securities fraud.
Then there's a bankruptcy, the investors and creditors lose, the debt is forgiven for pennies on the dollar, and the original securities and employee 401K's are worth zip.
And a network which cost billions of dollars (which came from the above debt, securities, and 401K's) to build is given away to an enterprising bottom-fisher for peanuts (the peanuts are used for the pennies on the dollar to settle with the creditors; common stock holders generally get nothing).
That's how the system works. Being an enterprising bottom-fisher isn't necessarily bad (unless they did something criminal to make the bankruptcy happen, like colluding with the company management prior to bankruptcy). It's easy to see that the bankruptcy process is hard to police and full of opportunities for fraud, and in a 401K-based retirement system the little guy gets nailed if he doesn't watch it or doesn't have a choice on investments.
But bad as that is, there's another level of "sinister" that worries me even more; enemies of the US, getting control of US infrastructure. This is a threat to National Security. What happened with Global Crossing, Hutchison Whampoa, Richard Perle, etc. and what continues to happen with Global Crossing showed that the US government is also struggling with this one.
There's a lot of stuff that the writers of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act didn't anticipate.