Water may be different than food, you're right, because of the costly infrastructure in place to deliver water to indoor plumbing. But in this respect water is like local phone service. Local phone companies may be, at worst, natural monopolies. This speaks in favor of greater regulation, but not necessarily in favor of public ownership. And long distance service and other wholesale phone services can be provided privately and competitively. Similarly, large scale water supplies can be privately owned without disaster. Oil and natural gas are so provided at the wholesale level, notice, even where local gas utilities are monopolies.
I'm not convinced that water is a natural monopoly, however, despite the plumbing costs. It might be possible for several companies to lay pipe, just as several private railroads built tracks.
In any event, it's hard to understand the complaint about remote ownership of water as something distinct from a complaint about large companies selling hardware, or, again, food, or whatever.