Utilities are considered natural monopolies because of at least two things: First, it's inefficient to have more than one set of distribution infrastructure serving the same set of customers. Second, it's generally a rule that producing a utility (water, sewer, electricity, gas, garbage removal, etc.) provides efficiencies of scale. We give utilities a monopoly and they are regulated in terms of pricing, but it's hard to regulate quality and it doesn't help when regulators "lose the plot" and start demanding things unrelated to safety, reliability and cost.
Things like water, gas and electricity should be so cheap and reliable that it isn't worthwhile to try and produce them on your own. The fact that people are spending their own money to go off-grid, tells us that if you run a monopoly badly enough, you bring DIY into range for people. The same kind of thing is impossible to ignore in public education: Eventually, economies of scale and monopolies aren't enough to overcome fat, dumb and lazy.
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