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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

What I have seen in UK on other and several other countries with some utilities (not sure if these sewers apply) is that privatisation happened, which was supposed to be good as we learned from the US (… right …), however, if that happens without competitors, it just means that there is one public now turned private company with money and shareholder pressure and 0 competitors will simply up the pricing, cut corners and do less and less over the years until things break enough to get into the news papers and questions to responsible gov agencies.

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The privatisation of infrastructure with no possibility of competition existing is simply a way to loot the countries wealth like a dictator can. Except it is done under the cover of "free markets".

> if that happens without competitors

It does almost by definition. Sewers are a natural monopoly, it's physically infeasible to switch providers.

Well no, we actually have this model in the UK with internet, electricity and gas - you have one infrastructure maintained by a national operator, but you buy your services from any provider you wish, so there is competition in for example who provides your gas, even though obviously no one comes to your house to change your gas pipes every time you change providers.

> you have one infrastructure maintained by a national operator

Yeah I know this model but here the one infrastructure is the service.

Is there any difference though? The gas you get in your pipes is the service, it doesn't change at all no matter who your provider is. You could imagine a situation where your water/sever infrastructure was maintained by one company but the service is sold by a selection of providers, who then have an incentive to pressure the operator to provide a certain standard of service.

It's easy to see how that might be beneficial for Internet: pay Openreach for last mile access but your chosen operator takes over after that. You can see an advantage for electricity and gas if you squint really hard: your supplier is responsible for buying power to add to the grid to serve you, and different suppliers can make different (if heavily constrained) choices.

It's really hard to see how this works with water. Upstream of your taps is an essentially fixed set of water collecting infrastructure. Downstream of your waste pipe is a natural monopoly sewer system which collects waste towards a single geographically determined water treatment plant. What is there for a competitive operator to change?

The honest answer is that water privatisation was the product of a very specific brand of 80s-00s magical thinking that believed the private sector was necessarily more efficient even without a plausible model of how the efficiencies would happen. There's a reason water and rail were two of the last privatisations, long after all the things like British Airways where there were reasonable grounds to believe the private sector was a better home.

Exactly. Just need to build a few more sewer networks so we can have competition.

Many fundamental components of society aren’t amenable to market based competition. The public sector can be inefficient, but in many cases the alternative is a form of economic tyranny that is far far worse. In the UK, most of our key infrastructure has been privatised and it has been a disaster for our economy and for the population. One of the likely causes of the UK’s productivity crisis is the lack of investment in infrastructure caused by privatisation, for example.

This is all rather self-evident but I’m so surprised how very intelligent, highly educated people often are unable to see that government is sometimes superior to the private sector. It seems their judgements are clouded by dogmatic ideology, but because that ideology is capitalism they are unaware that their dogmatism is no different from the others that they regularly mock and criticise.

This is resolvable with regulation and operation conditions being in place. We just have very weak regulation in some sectors.

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