I don't favor monopolies but, because I live in Los Angeles, I see that a city can act like a sluggish, greedy monopoly, too.

Here, the city owns the roads and electrical grid, and it's doing a mediocre or poor job of maintenance. We don't, for example, have "state of the art high throughput roads." Many of the roads are crumbling and need complete replacement. There's a huge backlog.

There's also a multi-year backlog of decaying wooden power poles which need to be replaced because they're in danger of coming down during a windstorm.

And, when people go to the expense of having solar panels installed on their homes, they have to wait many months for the city to come out and inspect and give permission to connect to the grid.

The city does not have a good handle on the problems. (Don't get me started about the leaky water mains.) City ownership of infrastructure is no guarantee of good service and value for money either.

And of course, as you say, with monopolies, we're screwed too. I don't see any easy answer.