Which is a nice way of saying the wireless industry AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile needs some ground rules that make clear they are common carriers that get the right to rent the airwaves by abiding by fair rules.
Right now, they play by their own rules.
Imagine if the wireless carriers controlled your wired broadband connection or your television set. You'd have to buy your television from your cable company, with a two-year contract, and when that ended, you'd have to ask them to unlock it so you could take it to another provider.
If the wireless company ran your ISP, you'd have to use a computer they approved, and if you wanted to use a different one, you'd pay more. Want Wi-Fi in your house? That'll be an extra $30 a month and $150 to buy an approved but functionally limited Wi-Fi device.
Luckily, that's not the case.
Lets recap the freedoms you have with your television: The specs are standard and public. Any company that wants to make a television whether it be an HD, 3-D, internet-connected plasma 6-footer or a handheld TV Walkman just makes a television, according to transparent (FCC) spectrum rules.
Then you get to buy it. It just works. You watch the stations you want. You can hook it up to cable or satellite or DVR or plug a DVD player into it.
With your home broadband connection, you can buy the router of your choice, hook up as many computers as you like, and use whatever programs you like on your computers. You can even use your connection as a base station for your cellular phone, or have your bathroom scale automatically report your weight to Twitter.
You can even share that internet connection with whomever you like, including strangers who might otherwise be customers of that same ISP.
When you upgrade your computer or router (or even the smartphone that uses your home Wi-Fi), your ISP doesn't even know and doesn't care.
The world of mobile in the U.S. is different. Much different.
You only get a single device, one that has to be preapproved by the carrier.
The device is almost always locked down. If you manage to pry its OS open enough to install software, you void your warranty.
If you care to use your 3G connection occasionally as a modem for your laptop, be prepared to pay $30 extra a month or hack the device and (see above) void your warranty.
If you want to switch devices, you'll often be forced to upgrade to a more expensive plan, even if your current plan offers unlimited data. For instance, Sprint has tens of thousands of users using its old friends-of-a- employee plan, known as SERO, which offered unlimited data on its best smartphones. Unhappy with the bargain it struck, the company refuses to let those customers upgrade to new devices even if they buy the devices for full price.
Any device that runs on these carriers networks must be approved by the carriers.
The wireless industry defends itself, saying that its changed its ways. Long notorious for crippling their phones and strangling app developers who wanted access to their devices, the carriers have loosened their policies, since AT&T made its fateful deal with Apple, which ripped control of the device out of AT&Ts hands.
The result showed to the world how the wireless industry had purposely crippled cell phones to boost their bottom lines, customers be damned.
Now, the FCC, which is mulling more official net-neutrality rules, has the chance to finish the job Apple started, but couldn't bring itself to finish removing the carriers stranglehold over mobile devices.
Unfortunately, the idea of setting basic, common carrier ground rules rules that simply lay out what freedoms we all expect are somehow being twisted into the government taking control of the internet. (In which case, we must be living in a Communist country because the proposal is simple.)
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