Tom lee explains it all:
Nearly all phones are locked, minimizing their resale value. Transferring your contact information between low-to-midrange phones is difficult or impossible. Until recently, you couldn't take your phone number with you (number portability is a much-loved big-government mandate that the carriers fought tooth & nail). Although some carriers let you transfer your contract to someone else without paying an ETF, doing so while retaining your number is more than a little tricky, if not downright impossible. And of course, contract lengths are typically longer than a mobile phone's technological relevance, ensuring that these barriers will be in place until the phone is worth only a fraction of its initial value, needs a new lithium battery, and is generally headed for the donation bin.
The leading cellular companies have fought hard to maximize their profits at the expense of competition that would benefit the consumer. An excellent example of that was, as Tom points out, the many years when your phone number was controlled by your cellular service carrier, and you couldn't change companies without losing your number. A libertarian, of course, would say that you could still change carriers and just give people the new number -- but no one is accusing the Cingular of entirely destroying competition, just muting its beneficial effects in order to jack up their profits.
Competition, of the right sort, is good! But sometimes you need regulatory action to enable it. So if you're not a libertarian and are thus uninterested in rationalizing why companies should be able to do just about anything that increases their profits, you might be interested in this article (via) on how the French government stepped in to create a competitive market in broadband. "In 2001, France had one of the weakest markets for broadband Internet access in the developed world, with less than a quarter of the penetration of the U.S. Today, it has sailed past the U.S. to become one of the world's most wired nations..." The article goes on to explain the regulatory decisions the French government made that fostered this improvement, and contrasts that with the regulatory decisions that American companies have blocked, leaving us with a stagnant, substandard, and astonishingly expensive broadband market. It's notable here that the Wall Street Journal accused Clinton's FCC commissioner of being a "French Bureaucrat." Oh, if only...
