[dinedal]

I see this as really no different then Dell's bloatware being installed on Dell sold PC's, though there are worrying exceptions.

AT&T limits some (all?) of it's phones to prevent them access to the standard Android market. However, I think to combat this behavior you can't call the phone a Google Experience phone or something without following some basic ground rules like allowing the standard market, and keeping up with updates.

Some phones do not allow the user to install a custom ROM or root the device. This is worrying because it would be like buying a Dell that won't let you reformat with *nix. Of course, there are plenty of vulnerabilities in the wild (akin to Jail Breaking) that get around this. I believe most vendors prevent the user from gaining root access to their device to upsell them on features that don't require any work on their part except flipping a bit in software, (tethering comes to mind, visual voice mail is another)

For the second part, I believe that carriers aren't going to let go of this income and become network infrastructure maintainers like cable companies without regulation, unfortunately.