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.
> So how come there are countries without a natural monopoly and with competing utility providers?
Local governments own most U.S. utility lines and pipes, so a competing for-profit utility would have to go against the not-for-profit public service, leaving low to no room for profit and no reason to even compete.
Fiber/cable/dsl lines are one of the few U.S. utilities with competition because the performance/reliability/features of the service can vary greatly and because almost no local governments ran their own ISP before private companies came in and ran their lines. I can bet that any area with a municipal ISP has a very low chance of seeing xfinity/att run their own fiber if they're not already servicing the area.
