Android
Posted Jan 6, 2010 21:52 UTC (Wed) by
drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to:
Android by quotemstr
Parent article:
Looking forward to 2010
I really don't care personally.
The way fees add up and the costs of the company is not really clear cut.
It is certainly cheaper, as I partially pointed out above, to have people
in long term contracts even though they may pay the same amount of money as
a person with a monthly contract.
Also one of the big deals about selling a subsidized phone is that the
carrier installs restrictive and custom firmware on it. These firmwares are
designed to 'encourage' users to use services that cost extra.
So in that way customers using custom firmwares are more profitable then
customers using retail. So that is another reason for the subsidy that is
not going to show up in when you compare rates.
If you want to do government action on it then more laws is not the answer.
The only reason wireless carriers are able to be assholes to their
customers is because the USA government has handed over monopoly access to
the most useful parts of the radio spectrum.
Any significant amounts of regulation is not going to hurt them or help you
one bit. Instead what it is going to do is raise the barrier of entry for
competing companies; therefore allowing these corporations to get away with
being even bigger assholes.
I work in a heavily regulated industry so I know for a fact that is what
happens. The corporations are so heavily regulated that they pretty much do
whatever the fuck they want with no serious repercussions. If any of these
companies ever decided to leave the market then the government would be
completely screwed... why? Because there is nobody stupid enough with
millions and millions of dollars and years of time to blow on building a
infrastructure that can meet the requirements the government has set up.
It's now impossible for any new corporation to enter the market so the
existing ones can do pretty much anything they want as long as it's not
blatantly illegal.
As far as cell phone carriers go if you make this sort of behavior illegal
they will just find some other way to screw people over.
And you know what the catcher is? People volunteer for it. From what I can
tell most people overwhelming prefer to get into 2 year contracts.
Who are you to say that they are not allowed to do this if they want to?
Why should they not be able to trade some liberty for cheap smart phones?
The best way you can do things is talk with your cash and convince others
to agree with you. That is a lot more effective way to control the
corporations then your votes are to control the government. And if you want
to have more control then tell the FCC to open up the radio spectrum and
get rid of the DRM-ish restrictions on radios.
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