Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you draw the line? What shouldn't we socialize?
Excellent question. Anything that doesn't have a natural monopoly. I can say with certainty that the following should be socialized or delivered in non-profit ways: * Water * Sewer * Power * Internet * Healthcare * Fire * Police * Roads * Education (added per /u/CodeMage) Feel free to chime in if you can add anything I forgot.
For example, here in the UK, we have the formerly nationalised telephone network provider required to allow individual ISPs access to key parts of its infrastructure via local loop unbundling, so those ISPs compete for the contracts with individual customers. And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities.
In other news, prices for Internet access in the UK seem to be dramatically cheaper than most places in the US.