Water is far from “mostly free”, especially at the amounts used by soda makers
Don’t know the situation in america so what you say may be true, but on some countries (developing ones where the power of the state is diminished) water is not free for everybody else, but multinational corporations get almost unlimited use concessions for their bottlers for a laughably low fee if any, drying out the area and sometimes literally leaving towns or regions with no public water left for other uses, forcing the people to have to pay for other sources. I don’t live in a place in that situation yet, but some other regions in my country are going exactly through that. In some cases, those beverages are for the american market.
It probably not that cheap anywhere in the U.S., but on the other hand, they probably get enough tax breaks to make up for it.
Here in Germany they can extract millions of liters for a symbolic euro, that is basically free and also far from a third world country. Coke has enough power to get through with this.
