|
Posted by John David Galt on June 17, 2008, 6:25 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> Frankly, i fail to see what a phone could possibly offer to justify
> its high cost. If someone is willing to pay the money for the phone,
> fine, go and enjoy, but no one is forcing you; it is clearly a luxury
> item, not a necessity.
>
> To me, it's like complaining about the costs or sales terms of a high
> end automobile (e.g. $40,000 on up), when one can get a very nice car
> for much less.
What you're missing is this: much of the functionality of high-end
cellular phones (not just the iPhone but also the Blackberry and its
various imitators) is overpriced because of "bundling", which is the
clever misuse of a legal monopoly right such as intellectual property
to gain monopoly-like control of other goods and services that extend
beyond the scope of the legal monopoly.
Not only portable computers but also digital cameras could easily be
combined in a single device with a cellular phone without being
locked so you can't configure them to work the way YOU want, or so
that you can't upload a picture from the camera onto your PC without
transmitting it over the cellular phone for an extra fee. But the
big phone companies that now control the cellular market in the US
won't allow any such unlocked device to operate on their networks,
and they've conned the FCC into conflating any attempt with hacking
and theft-of-service.
The cure is for the FCC, or Congress, to issue a "cellular Carterfone
decision" and put a stop to the abuse. The purpose of your handheld
device should be to do what you want, not to generate billable events.
For more information see http://ipaction.org/
| ![Re: Monopolies and iPhone [Telecom]](/images/header.jpg)
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML site map