[toxik]

It's a battle for the control of the device. The ideal setup for the big corpos is that we do not own our devices, but we rent them, and they can then charge arbitrarily for different uses of them. This was what AT&T did with phones back in the day.

[tomohawk]

To expand on that, AT&T had a regulated monopoly. You were not allowed to attach non AT&T devices to their network, and they had the only network (and no one else could set one up by law). You did not own a phone, but leased it on a monthly basis.

When the telephone answering machine was invented (not by AT&T) you could not legally attach it.

The plus of this arrangement was that AT&T made devices that would last for decades, all areas of the country got service (regardless of wealth or population density or politics), and costs were not surprising. The minus of this arrangement was that innovation was stifled and some costs were artificially high. It became a competitive disadvantage that was holding our country back from innovation. There is a correlated timeframe between the breakup of AT&T and the massive expansion of the computer industry.

[indymike]

> costs were not surprising

Costs were mind boggling and surprising. I got in huge trouble when I was in elementary school because I called my best friend who lived 1 mile away. It could cost more to call someone who lived in a different LATA (in my case, the other LATA was one mile away) than it did to call a different time zone. As I recall a call 1 mile away was billed at 23¢ per minute and a call to Portland, Oregon, three time zones away was 12¢ per minute (and this was in 1977 money, which where one dollar was worth six hamburgers). Another: the cost to rent a handset was $3 per month. By 1988 (and $1 was worth four hamburgers), you could buy a touch tone phone for $3 at Target.

[tomohawk]

Absolutely right - I'd forgotten about that. The fun of regulation driven services.