No one is forcing you to use an electrical company. You could always power your house with a bicycle generator. Therefore, electrical companies shouldn't be regulated as public utilities.
Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions restrictions. You also can't power your home with a bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.
Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.
You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.
Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.
I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.
Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.
Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.
Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?
You could just create battery trailer to power your house and drive to the next Tesla charging station with it whenever it runs low. No need for power lines or any power generation in your backyard. Maybe someone should propose that trailer idea to Elon? Tesla already produces everything necessary to take yourself of the grid, it only needs to be bundled up right.
You can make that decision in rural areas. It costs a lot of money to get wires run to a new house. You might use solar instead with a generator as backup.
In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.
Creating your own power plant, lugging gallons of oil for power generation, or hiring someone to 24/7 power you home via bicycle all cost a few orders of magnitude more than paying the utility company for service, and creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly. For search engines, it's both easy to switch to a different one as a consumer and it's easy for someone new to come in and create a profitable competitor (see bing, ddg).
And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
> creating a competing utility company wouldn't make sense competitively in any way, so naturally there's a monopoly
So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?
Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.
I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.
Manuel_D|4 years ago
Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.
smaudet|4 years ago
You can do everything with water with rain-barrels and buckets. As others have said, you can do power with candles, bike generators, and wood fire.
Is that a realistic solution in a modern society? Hell no.
I struggle to see how anyone honestly can lie to themselves that it is somehow absurd to label something a "utility" just because the technology has advanced beyond cave-man level.
Google deserves their status as a utility - monopolies, effective or otherwise, we have consistently found to be actively harmful.
Furthermore, if a company wants to be a "be-all-everything technological solution", it is actively attempting to usurp the role of government. And when that govt is un-elected, that's a despotic oligarchy, at best. We may well be forced to storm Google HQ and put every Google CEO's head on the chopping block if we want to preserve our liberty.
Or, y'know, maybe just support getting them regulated instead, bit more of a humane solution, dontcha think?
josefx|4 years ago
andyana|4 years ago
unishark|4 years ago
In many urban areas you may not even be allowed to opt out of utilities meanwhile. I once delayed paying for the water bill in a new house for a month till I moved in and needed, got a big late bill finally because the fees are mandatory for the house.
torgian|4 years ago
judge2020|4 years ago
inetknght|4 years ago
And, just as naturally, the government actually owns a lot of the distribution network. The producers provide into the distribution network, the customers receive from the distribution network, and the government regulates fair (by some definition thereof) access.
ascar|4 years ago
So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?
Also running your own generator with oil isn't a few orders of magnitude (i.e. at least 100x) more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even one order of magnitude more expensive, but maybe just twice as expensive.
I also don't think GP's simile is good, but some of your arguments against it are just blatantly false.