Internet companies are a good example of how difficult it is to bring a utility to a giant metro area. I'm not sure if that's because of government barriers or because of actual physical logistics. Even Google Fiber seems to have given up. But then you look at places where internet is managed by the government like Fort Collins and you have extremely fast, extremely cheap community internet. But then again, that's a pretty small homogenous rural community. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of utility distribution just sporadic data points so I can't hope to get close to the truth about this.

It does seem like if you have the government and industry working together on something, it's the worst of all worlds rather than just one or the other.