You hit it on the head.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly I will strongly argue that most utiliti

You hit it on the head.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly I will strongly argue that most utilities are natural monopolies, google is not like that.. anyone could create a equivalent functionality search engine without massive resources to do so, this is most certainly not the case with say, a cellular carrier, where to build out one moderately sized market your're looking at starting cost ~100 million dollars, and around 5 billion to start for a national carrier (250k a site, times 20,000 sites)... and my numbers are likely too low by half, because they only factor in the site costs, not the overhead to get to the point where you can build sites.