Americans live in a state of abject cell phone poverty. Of course, there are much worse kinds of poverty: economic, moral, spiritual. However, I think that this state of affairs speaks volumes about the kind of society we live and the risks it faces in the future.
As I noted in “cell phone meets world, pt. 1″ yesterday, the developing world is embracing the cell phone and quickly adopting and developing a wide variety of new ways to use them. In nearly all parts of the post-industrial world other than the U.S. (most particularly Europe and Japan), the mobile phone is (and has been for years) essentially a mini-computer. It is capable of advanced word-processing, playing video and images, surfing the internet, and nearly everything else a real computer does. Text messaging is normal part of everyday professional and personal life. They can be linked to one’s bank account and swiped at stores (like a debit card). They have built-in camera as good as some single function cameras. They travel between countries with no problem. And the look cool, really cool. Whereas Americans use mobile phones essentially as phone with a few bonuses, people in other countries carry around multi-purpose, tiny computers. Probably most irritating to your average American locked into a 75 year Verizon contract costing $100 a month, is that cell phones aren’t costing anybody else nearly as much.
There are many reasons for this disparity. First, American cell phone companies use antiquated network technology and lock consumers into using one phone on one service (for more on the technical issues, read here). Second, though the U.S. cell phone market is highly competitive, the fact that companies lock consumers into monthly plans and multi-year contracts essentially gives one company a monopoly over the individual. By contrast, in Europe, consumers pay the actual cost of a phone, buy pay-as-you-go cards at fairly affordable rates, and can switch between companies at anytime. This results in far more competitive pay-as-you-go rates. (Additionally, Europeans don’t pay for incoming calls, unlike us stateside dopes).
Because the cell service companies have such a stranglehold on marketplace and even the models of the phones, they have kept many new technologies from coming out on the U.S. market. Cell phone makers like Nokia, LG, Samsung, and others are currently producing a wide variety of cool phone technologies that Americans don’t have because Verizon, At&T, and Cingular require very specific specs for their network-specific models of each phone.
This free market disaster — in which Americans don’t have access to the best available technologies because of the capacity of companies to control the availability in an unregulated fashion — is typical of the kind of society we have today. Because of the unwillingness of political elites to intervene, regulate, and encourage good behavior among corporations, we see American slipping behind the rest of the developed world. The same is true of environmental technologies like wind power. Unlike so many European nations, the U.S. government has done very, very little to encourage the development of such technologies or to help companies make environmental options (like residential solar products) consumer-friendly.
Our free market dogmatism — a resistance to regulating in pro-consumer ways — has undoubtedly left us in the dust of Europe and Japan in the realm of cell phone technology. The same pigheadedness could have far more serious repercussions in other domains.
