I also have generally positive experiences with power company employees. On the other hand:

i. I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.

ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.

It's not poor customer service I worry about. It's a total lack of infrastructure investment.

> I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.

The same is true for many folks and Comcast or Time Warner - it's hardly unique to utilities. Here in Rochester, NY TWC is the only reasonable option for high-speed internet in most areas - the local phone company Frontier is crap, and the upstart fiber company is only in a few high-density spots thus far.

Meanwhile, your city and state governments can really give the power company a rough time if enough citizens are complaining.

Wait, you can't chose between different power companies in the US? Even in socialist Europe that isn't normally a problem. I can choose between at least a dozen different providers of electricity, and at least half a dozen providers of Internet and landline telephone access. And that's just in the rural parts of the country. Granted most of the infrastructure is centralized, but that doesn't stop competition on extending it.

Maybe the problem isn't whether Internet access should be regulated as a utility service but simply that utility services in the US are crap?

There are choices for service providers in many places in the US. However, there is one set of power lines, and I would presume that most power losses are due to the power line failures.

You used to be able to choose. Then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis happened.

You need to point out that it was Enron causing the problem, not everybody has the context anymore of how badly they screwed California.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

Not wholly. Poor government intervention caused the problem as well.

Poor government intervention meaning "not doing a damn thing" then, yeah, you're right.

No, it meant capping retail prices and letting wholesale ones float. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#G...

> ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.

Is that power run an overhead ComEd hasn't/won't bury?

Most people can't fire their internet provider.