I think all these kinds of tying arrangements are inherently anti-competitive. How can a small carrier compete? Just by virtue of its not being big, companies like AT&T and Apple (or Verizon and RIM, or ...) can make deals that exclude the small carrier. The small carrier ought to be able to compete head-to-head with AT&T on what they actually offer, on a piece by piece basis. All the carriers ought to be forced to offer a pure pipe, varying if they want on how much bandwidth is used; then they can all go head-to-head. Not forcing that on the carriers is inevitably bad for the consumers. Likewise allowing the carriers to force more than just pipe access on the consumers is anti-competitive.

If you had real Adam Smith capitalism, with hundreds of carriers, then some carrier would independently decide to offer a pure pipe as a means to compete against the ones who don't. But with only several carriers, there's an oligopoly and none of them find it worthwhile to compete that way, even if it's what customers most want. Instead they differentiate themselves by choosing what combination of crap they force on the consumers, and they make believe that's real competition. For many years, the American system generally has shown no interest in interfering with oligopolistic/monopolistic behavior, but it hasn't been so bad for a hundred years as it was under Bush. The current Supreme Court tilts pro-monopoly, too.

Maybe under Obama things will get better. It's a better FCC for one thing. We can hope (with more reason than we had a year ago for hoping).