If you have competent government bottled water shouldn't be better than tap. I prefer tap because I find bottled tastes too little.
What if it's mostly competent, but the agency in charge of the water supply is the bad apple that spoils the whole bunch?
If a bottled water company decided they could save a tiny amount switching to a plastic type that was legal but might give you cancer in 10 years, do you trust them not to do that?
Anyone making that decision is thinking short term. By the time the harm becomes public they've enriched themselves and left.
Government is less likely to knowingly poison you, and is probably about equally likely to unknowingly poison you.
Private companies are not immune from consequences.
I agree that it's still possible to be poisoned by bottled water, but there are a greater number of incentives in place to lessen the likelihood of it happening.
So, if you cannot trust government, you cannot trust private companies to not poison you either. I guess it's possible to have governments break down just enough to screw up the local water supply while not quite rolling in the bed with multinational companies yet, but I doubt such an arrangement would be stable for long.
The company declared bankruptcy rather than pay the cleanup bills, but the owner and executives just started a new one, hired the same management, and everything is fine (for them), since taxpayers paid for the cleanup?
I think the name of the company was "Freedom Industries", which makes it even more of a typical american "urban legend", but it is actually true.
[edit] just looked it up, its called "Elk river cheminal spill" on wikipedia, and the exec actually used the same address and the same phone number to set up Lexycon LLC, the new company: they know they'll get away, they don't care to hide anymore.
Better hope that new brand isn't just the old one with a new label slapped on.
One way of knowing would be that you can see trustworthy water testing. That there are consequences (political, legal) for public officials when there is wrongdoing. That society seems to function.
How would you know a company bottling water isn't incompetent?
1. https://hackaday.com/2022/04/02/monitoring-water-quality-usi...
That's the biggest "if" I've ever seen.
Same goes for corporations, especially bigger ones.