Once upon a time, in a land very very close, there was a telecom monopoly. Her symbol was the death star, and she regulated everything about what you could do on a phone line, or what you could attach to it. No one could attach a phone to the old wired networks that Ma Bell didn't approve of and no one could do anything with that line Ma Bell didn't agree to.

Rebels rose to challenge the Empire. The first was the Hush-A-Phone, an attachment placed on phones to make them less noisy. Twas a fierce battle and it was waged from 1948 – 1956, but in the end the Rebels won, and Bell was forced to allow the attachment. The great battle that many have forgotten, a battle which allowed the creation of the Internet, however, was the Carterfone case. A Carterfone allowed a phone to communicate with a radio, and the Empire simply would not allow such a device to be attached to its network. Why, security and the need to defend the integrity of the network could not allow such a thing. Soon, if Carterfones were allowed, the network would crumble, no one would be able to make a phone call and cats and dogs would be living together.

In 1968 the Empire lost this battle as well and the Carterfone Principle was born: you can attach any device to your ground line that you want, as long as it meets certain very basic rules. Without Carterfone there would probably have been no widespread adoption of modems (and thus, likely, no Internet). There would probably have been no fax machines and no answering machines. The future, as it were, would have been stillborn and the great technological revolution on the late nineties likely would not have occurred, or would have occurred somewhere other than the US at a later date.

But the Empire always rises again. Even as revolution is inevitable, so is the urge to make everyone who comes before you pay a toll; and to make sure the future is controlled by you, even if that means the future is much smaller than if everyone were allowed to contribute to it.

And so it has been with the new wireless telecom companies. In the days of the Death Star, there was only one. Today there are four, and by these names you shall know them: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

More On the Successor States After the Jump

Each has their fiefdom, and each is determined to protect that fiefdom, not so much from each other, though as with nobles of old they do engage in fierce, formalized wars – broad missives of advertising campaigns exploding above, print ads storming the breach, fusillades of price cuts and the enfilade of a new feature – but rather from those who own no fief. There is no enemy greater to the monopolist or the oligopolist than those outside the walls who see the rich fields of green and long for some of it themselves. No one else must be allowed to take a toll from their peasants, no one must be allowed to offer a better service, a better phone, or show the customers how to avoid any fee collector or toll booth.

So it always was, and so it always shall be. And so the Big 4 generally do not allow phones they have not approved to be connected to their networks. No phone not sold by Verizon may be used upon their network; AT&T and T-Mobile lock phones in so that they can only be used on their networks and no others; and of the great houses, only Sprint allows any phone to be used on its network.

All of the Big 4 subsidize phones extensively, then charge more on the back end to make it up. Between the technical limitations (which include disabling features they don't like) and the subsidies, about 80% of all phones sold in the US are sold by the Big 4. In lands beyond their reach – land with exotic names like Europe and South Korea: the numbers are reversed, and consumers have access to about 4 times as many phone models. Coincidentally, cell phones there offer more services and have deeper penetration and stronger networks with more interoperability.

For as with all oligopolies; as with all monopolists; as with all nobles; the key to riches in the telecom world; as the Big 4 see it, in any case, is making sure that no one makes any money from their network, who doesn't pay them a cut. And so you can take pictures with your phone, but phone makers have not in most cases been allowed to give you a free and easy way to send those pictures to your home computer. Instead, AT&T, for example, requires its phone users to sign up for three services: Text Messaging, Media-Net, and Multi-Media Messaging. The gentle reader will not be surprised to hear that the great house of AT&T charges a fee for each of those three services.

But then, why not take a Bluetooth enabled phone and simply beam it to your computer. The peons are clever – but the Big 4 are smarter still. That feature of Bluetooth “enabled” phones has been, ummm, disabled.

Nor can your phone track your time usage (wouldn't want people to be able to dispute timing bills or to think about how long a call is going on and cut it short). Neither can you download songs from iTunes on most networks; nor can you use WiFi to make WiFi enabled calls (any subject of the Big 4 should be able to figure out why this is); nor, indeed are you allowed to use your phone's Internet connection for anything but browsing, e-mail or connecting to your corporation's intranet. You can't download files, games or music. You can't go to YouTube, if you're a Verizon subscriber. And many websites are simply blocked.

The odd thing about all this? Verizon, for example, advertises that it offers unlimited broadband. But if you go over a certain amount of usage a month, they cut off your account and charge you an account cancellation fee.

Truly, to be an oligopolist is the good life. Because when you are, a word means what you say it means, not what some dictionary says it does.

Still, in this world there is always change and change is to be feared. Time toppled even the Old Empire and that lesson has not been lost upon those who have come after old Ma Bell...

Innovation's one problem. Let it get out of control and who knows what might happen. These engineers and coders and entrepreneurs are all very good, mind you, so long as they know their place.

And their place is that nothing they do can work over our network, or on phones connected to our networks, the networks we paid billions for and which are OURS not the public's, without our permission. Certainly there will be no wireless version of Craigslist unless it is willing to pay us two cents per page view. Makes the business model impossible? Pity. Remember, there is no such thing as a viable business model which does not include us getting our cut, or which destroys one of our older businesses.

I mean we make millions from selling ringtones. Why, exactly, would you expect us to allow you to download content from the web onto your phone – you could download ringtones! No sirree, there will be no cars allowed in this world, because the buggy-whip manufacturers control the roads, and we'll not be allowing those new fangled contraptions to use our roads – it's for your own good. They go so fast, someone could be hurt. We're just looking out for your best interests.

Indeed, there is no reason for us to allow anyone to do anything over our networks, really. But we are not mean, or petty, we will allow you to pay for the right to talk to us. And we'll review your products to see if they are appropriate. Certainly we can't have a situation like the Internet where some fool like Bezos can set up a company like Amazon with almost no money, working part time, and not cut us in for a big chunk of the profit. There will be no Dell's in our world. No Amazons. And certainly no Craiglists. Nor will there be anything spontaneous or unexpected, because it will all come through us.

And the hoi polloi will not be given access to the tools required to work on our phones. The hardware will remain a black box, which programmers cannot access. We certainly wouldn't want some random fool, like Gates in the 70's, say, to be able to hack around on our system and create something we don't take our cut from.

Noblesse Oblige But you have to understand, it's all for your own good and all this foolish talk of oligopoly is nothing but. Why anyone can get in on the business if they have a few billion to buy up some public bandwidth. Why that makes joining in the club available to practically anyone – add a few more billion dollars for staff and infrastructure and you might be in a position to set up a small fiefdom easily crushed by a bit of price competition!

No, the market is an open one and the way we operate is intended to ensure the security of the system so that innovation remains firmly under our control and nothing messy like what happened in the 90's with the Internet happens over our networks. Imagine – all that money floating around, and no one able to skim off their fair share because they were in a position to put tolls on the information superhighway.

That's why we've worked very closely with FCC, especially with the last Chairman, Powell, to ensure that the same rules – things like allowing anything to be plugged into the network that meets basic rules, not allowing content discrimination and universal agreed upon standards open to all developers don't happen in our industry.

Because we certainly wouldn't want a repeat of the Internet revolution or what happened when the Old Empire was broken up.

Trust us. We have your best interests at heart. We know what you want and don't want better than you do. You don't need to be able to buy any phone you want, see any website you want, download anything you want, make a phone call over VoiP from your cell phone; or be able to use your phone to interact with any network.

Really, trust us. We have our best interests at heart. And they're the same as your best interests.

Honest.

This article was largely based on Tim Wu's excellent paper. (By the way Tim, it's a pain to download your paper). The paper is worth your time.. Any errors or broad brush strokes are mine, not Tim's. Hat tip to Matt Stoller.