> There is no such thing as a proper regulated market.
There is a distinction between the absence and presence of regulatory capture. Preventing regulatory capture is obviously a hard problem but that's hardly any reason to countenance its presence.
Water is a fairly well regulated market in the US. It works because the actual cost of water is low and the external costs of things like water born diseases are vary high.
There are many other examples where a cheap good's price is significantly increased but few people care because the regulations don't impact them and it's still cheap.
A good example is the western states that don't have many natural resources. The government decided that water was a human right, built a ton of irrigation in the desert, and now you have populous states like Arizona, Nevada, and much of Southern California that shouldn't exist and cannot sustainably exist.
There is plenty of water for people in those areas, not enough for plants. For comparison the 800 mile Alasca pipeline moves 10times as much oil per day as all of the worlds declination plays put together. Or the equivent of about 1 million peoples daily water use. Scaling it up and arizona could import 100% of it's water usage for less than 1% of it's GDP. It's not free but less than the heating costs in many northern states.
In the end it's just a question of how many thousandth of a cent your willing to pay per gallon and you can have water anywhere you want. Agriculture happens to need a fucktun of the stuff but food is easy to move and land in those areas is cheap. So, it actually is reasonable for people to build on cheap land out there simply because it's not useful for anything else.
PS: Shure, we are rapidly draining a few aquifers but there is little point in leaving the water there in the first place.
Looking at the price of importing water is misleading because its not priced properly anywhere in the U.S. And training those aquifers is precisely why places like Arizona aren't sustainable.
We have a regulated market. Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are the ones who have captured it. Slowly becoming like government bureaus.
There is no such thing as a proper regulated market. That's like proper communism.
If you want regulated telecom, this is what you get.