Comment by wolframhempel

I am a deep believer in free markets as the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, creating better offerings and lower prices through competition and encapsulating risk in innovation. Unfortunately, none of these apply to the privatization of inherently public commodities that run on top of an underlying network infrastructure. This can be streets, railway tracks or water pipes - whenever there’s a shared, standardized network that needs to be maintained by all market participants a lot of the mechanisms that make privatization appealing don’t apply anymore and you basically end up with the same tragedy of the commons only in private hands. I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network - e.g. electricity providers that add energy to the grid.