Patents are government-created monopolies and aren't free-market. The same goes with FCC and/or utility regulations. Copyright for the code running on those chips is another government-created monopoly. It is the most egregious because they establish those monopolies for a hundred years.

Services like Straight Talk and others that sublease towers and bandwidth from companies like AT&T or Verizon have massively cheaper costs due to the lack of contract phones (lower risk), lower support costs, lower advertising costs, etc. These lower costs are then passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices to the point that Verizon or AT&T prepay services have changed in an attempt to compete and even their main contract service prices have lowered somewhat.

As an aside, AT&T or Verizon actually rent most of their towers from other companies like American Tower or Crown Castle. They market how they're upgrading their towers, but that's not entirely true (they're basically bidding against each other on priority for tower upgrades).

I went looking for a new phone recently, there were brands I hadn't seen before on the shelves. Why you would need your own chips is beyond me, when you can buy them for a pretty small price.

Not wanting to get Huawei-ed?

There are multiple options for chips, no? Are they all made in China?