Thanks! This answer was actually the one that I found most helpful. I feel like some of the other responses to my comment were talking about how we regulate lots of other tech, but that wasn't really my point - I understand that we regulate tech, but only when it becomes "economically convenient".
But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.
Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.
> Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.
Yes. Electric utilities were at one time quite powerful, around 1900 or so.
Read up on Samuel Insull [1], the early history of antitrust, the Utility Company Holding Act, and the history of public utility regulation. Many countries just nationalized the electrical power industry. The US didn't, but regulated it strictly for most of a century. As is typical, this followed a financial disaster.
The electricity infrastructure where I was live was owned by the government. It's only in the last 15 years it was sold off to private interests [1]. I suspect you will find that the electricity systems in many regions are still government owned.
Should be noted that Australia, and even NSW, had quite a few different systems. Country NSW was largely done by the (local) county councils and they didn’t seek to profit by once the debt was cleared and instead wanted to give out cheap power until they had to take on more debt.
This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company.
It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.
> But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.
I have for a while theorized that transport is what causes an (undue) aggregation of power. Cheap mass shipping was needed for the current industrial globalization to even work. Cheap communication is what gave rise to the internet giants we have today, and the power structures in general.
Transport of energy, especially electricity, is still relatively expensive, and so a distributed structure is naturally preferred. This, along with the ability to produce it in a more-or-less decentral way of course.
If we one day figure out really-cheap transport of electricity, I'm 100% sure it would only take quite a short time for a few global companies to stomp out all the competition.
But companies and governments owning the natural resources that powers the utilities took over the world.
US for example owns the LNG trade right now and that’s a major choke for power production across the world, China owns the rare earth metals that goes into solar and wind.
But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.
Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.