We can’t all have 6 different gas lines run to each building or even to each street to choose who to buy from.
Can you think of no other ways to deliver gas than running six pipes?
When everything becomes electric, we’ll have plenty of utility room to spare. Locking us into a different type of monopoly won’t allow room for innovation or advancement.
The next sentence was about shared infrastructure for the pipes. That multiple gas companies could use to distribute, with the caveat that they still would need to be owned by a single entity whether that’s a private company or municipality. I’d argue a municipality is the correct answer here.
If we look at electric as an analogous system, the poles and wires are always owned by a single company and then the supply can be “chosen.” Even though it’s just routing where your cash goes, since electricity is all pooled. The downside, is no matter how much I may not want to support the company that owns the poles and wires, I have no other option and there is no way for a competitive company to build another product to give the consumer a choice.
It’s why I advocate largely for the distribution infrastructure to become public owned, paid for and maintained with taxes. I don’t necessarily agree with the production of the gas/electricity/water. If the distribution infrastructure if publicly owned, then so long as a new business creates a product that matches the regulated quality they only need to pay for the permits and means to attach to the distribution network. We can lower the barrier of entry to new competitors.
The minimum standards would be set based on regulatory capture in very many municipalities. I don’t think it would be worse than jank monopolies, at least. I don’t know that the speed (or incentives) of either is something I trust with keeping up technologically.
Moving from a monopoly to a municipality doesn’t help when the standards they set are super strict.
We’ve tried that. What’s prone to happen is the corporations spend money to the municipalities to deregulate. Let’s stop giving them the chance. It hasn’t worked. Let’s instead go back to treating utilities as publically beneficial
