investor-owned utility

An investor-owned utility or IOU is a business organization, providing a product or service regarded as a utility (often termed a public utility regardless of ownership), and managed as private enterprise rather than a function of government or a utility cooperative. Such businesses can range from a family whose residential property includes a well whose flow in excess of the family's own needs produces a secondary income, to international communications conglomerates, but political and infrastructure considerations in some countries makes the private sector of the electric-power production and distribution industry the most often discussed investor-owned utilities there.