Every time we butt up against some
rotten problem in the mobile phone world, everyone's got someone else
to blame. The solution: Kill somebody (metaphorically).
The triumvirate of phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and
entertainment companies are the world's reigning champions at shifting
blame and pointing fingers. Ask Apple why it won't let you use any song
in your iTunes library as an iPhone ringtone and they'll tell you it's
the fault of the greedy record companies.

The music industry is supposedly so addicted to the vanishing
ringtone market that they won't let Apple get away with letting you use
the music you own in new ways without paying a ringtone tax (and some
of them won't let you use your music this way at all).

Likewise, ask Apple why the iPhone comes locked and they'll tell you
that AT&T (T) insisted on this as the only way that they'd offer
Apple handsets. AT&T will tell you that locked handsets and
vicious, one-sided term contracts are the only way to recoup the
upfront cost of offering subsidized handsets to customers (what, they
never heard of the installment plan?).

When Nokia (NOK) announced that their first 4GB handset was going to
be delayed by a month because they were adding Windows DRM (reducing
functionality and increasing cost), they blamed it on the carriers, who
were facing threats from the record industry -- who could pull
ringtones licenses from the carriers and deprive them of the revenue.

And so on and so on. Every time we butt up against some rotten
"feature" in the mobile phone world -- screwy data-pricing (the launch
of the iPhone was followed by a spate of stories about
multi-thousand-dollar phone bills that were delivered by forklift),
carrier-locked handsets, handsets that can't run user-installed
software, APIs that can't talk to the phone's radio hardware, batteries
tied to handsets by cryptographic protocols intended to stop you from
buying cheap generic replacements, phones that won't play your own
music or movies, phones whose numbers can't be ported to another
carrier, phones where number portability takes weeks or months,
"unlimited" data-plans that cut you off if you use too much data --
everyone's got someone else to blame. It's the greedy, stupid,
dinosauric carriers. It's the wimpy, gutless phone-manufacturers. It's
the coked-up Hollyweird fatcats from the record industry.

It starts to feel like a Mexican standoff, three tough guys, each
pointing a gun and the others' heads, deadlocked and unwilling to risk
anything to break the standoff. These kinds of hostage situations make
for gripping cinematic moments, but only when we care about one or more
of the hostages.

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