Our railroads paid a nice 300m in divident every year then corona came, people were told to stay home. You can guess who had to pay for the lack of travelers.
The most silly are ISP's. The prices in each country depend on how much people can pay and what you get for it is rng
The one privatisation I believe the UK got right was British Telecom.
We now have a strongly regulated infrastructure side called OpenReach - the price they can charge for last mile connectivity is limited, and as such we have a load of different ISP's which either compete on tech and service (AAISP, Zen) or cost (PlusNet et al).
And then a proliferation of alternative last mile providers has also occurred - I now have the option of 900/100 FTTP from OpenReach based suppliers, 1130/104 DOCSIS from Virgin Media and 900/900 FTTP from CityFibre based suppliers.
I'm paying £40 a month for the latter.
Hopefully there will be enough push to get 1Gbps Connection to every home rather than settled on 30Mbps.
[1] EXCLUSIVE: January 2025 update on broadband availability across the UK, nations and regions
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10528-exclusive-january-...
You can straightforwardly privatize things that can't be allowed to fail. Power generation is a decent example: If you have a hundred independent generating companies that all sell into a live auction market, they have to compete with each other which keeps prices down and the market as a whole remains reliable because there are many independent suppliers using different generation methods and if any one of them experiences a failure you can immediately switch to the others. The market has the incentive to be able to supply even during grid stress because the price will go up then, so suppliers with reserve capacity make back their costs for keeping it in reserve.
The problem comes when there is corruption. Instead of having a competitive market, the contract is assigned to cronies, or a lack of antitrust enforcement allows the market to consolidate until the suppliers are a cartel. Then, since competition is thing that gives privatization its advantage, the lack of competition causes the public to get screwed.
"Operating" the grid isn't the natural monopoly either. The natural monopoly is actually the physical space beneath the grid, i.e. the roads. If a storm knocks down a pole or some transmission lines need to be upgraded you could put out bids to any number of companies to come and do the work. If customers want to buy power from a generator, the grid is used to deliver it, but that doesn't mean the grid operator has to be an intermediary between the supplier and the customer instead of a vendor of the supplier paid to deliver power. It's not even obvious that they should be paying per kWh instead of funding distribution through taxes in the same way as the roads, since a well-functioning grid should never exceed peak capacity but using otherwise-idle transmission capacity has no variable cost.
And then what's the natural monopoly? Just physical ownership of the infrastructure, and some accountants to predict when demand is about to outstrip supply and bids should be put out to expand capacity.
I didn't get to bid in an auction. Providers bid until they had enough then the price was fixed based on the most expensive source.
We also designated a windy chunk of government land next to my city to private wind energy. Besides land it needed a bit of subsidee to spin them up.
Big turbines happened that provide enough power to run the city.
Not that the city didn't have the money to do it themselves. Its dwellers could also easily afford it. That's just not how things work around here.
Mysterious actors blew up some pipeline some place in the north and the highest bit went up dramatically.
It didn't fail, people just couldn't pay their bills anymore.
The market was very good at increasing profit when demand was larger than supply.
One could imagine worse circumstances with a larger effect.
That's what it's supposed to do. Then in the absence of regulatory barriers to entry, new suppliers enter the market to capture those profits, until the profits aren't so big anymore because there are more suppliers.
One of the things that messes people up here is that they want consistency but don't want to pay for it. You have a competitive market which is providing low prices until there is a supply disruption. Then prices are temporarily high. If you wanted to you could have bought insurance or futures etc. so that you would always pay a consistent price, but then you'd be paying a higher price than the market on the days when supply is good so that you could pay a lower price when supply is low. People then complain about that too, but those are your options; if you pick the "don't buy insurance" one then you're exposed to events, but you should be the one who gets to choose.
And maybe if you're poor you don't want the insurance, what you want is to have the lower price most of the time and cut back your usage when the price is high. But either way, that should be something you get to decide instead of something somebody decides for you.
My gut says it is like needing for example a car. You could rent or lease or you could buy one in cash on on credit. Each choice makes sense to someone. If it is to be a collective choice/deal it should be cheaper and I see no reason why it can't offer the same options. We have this weird tendency to shove all collective arrangements in governments boots where we know the outcome will be something stupid, turn into something ridiculous or both.
I really want to see gov processes strictly defined. Then we can have the government set up entirely independent bodies that strictly follow their charter. Ideally it pays no taxes, no one works there, no one owns it. I might even like blockchain for this purpose. We want 1234 new lease contracts for 2026, any company may bid, customers press accept. The one most accepted gets to provide the [proverbial] cars.
It seems doable.
What are some examples of successfully privatized utilities?
