You could make roughly the same points about the iTunes / record label relationship. If it were enough of a strategic advantage it might happen. I wouldn't cross your fingers though.

Great point, I didn't realize it but you're right: like a carrier, iTunes is infrastructure.

I'm sorry, but only two of those points are true. When iTunes came out, there was nothing like it in the market. A great way to manage and buy new music all at one place? Plenty of room for invention.

The proof that is was such a unique experience? The labels spent the next 2 years fighting tooth and nail for 'control' of their music catalogs back from iTunes.

I agree. Imagine not looking at your cell phone and thinking about how some shitty company with a government-granted oligopoly is screwing you over and treating you badly.

That's hardly true. iTunes is/was based on SoundJam which Apple bought. Before iTunes was available on Windows Apple recommended a third-party package (the name of which escapes me) for using iPods on that platform. The iTunes Music Store had (nascent) competition, and it arrived after iTunes had been released for a while.

You mean MusicMatch? Yeah, I had MusicMatch, and it was horrid for connecting to ipods and other gadgets. Plus, the buying experience was a mess. I don't remember SoundJam too well, but I don't seem to remember that you connect devices to it to transfer music, and I'm completely certain you couldn't buy music from the software itself.

Remember, this is back during the heydays of Napster, Audiogalaxy and the free download craze for music. iTunes, along with mp3.com, made it completely easy to download legit copies of music, which hadn't been possible before.

Those problems are opportunities if one knows how to solve them, and Apple might.

- Apple knows how to pull strings at FCC (e.g. appearance of Apple's products of FCC's website seems coordinated with official announcements). Apple isn't scared of patent battles and is well armed in this field. They can make their own hardware and work with 3rd party vendors.

- Apple keeps high margins on their computers, while PC manufacturers are in the race to the bottom. Perhaps a "premium" carrier could pull that off too? (especially if they could do more innovations like visual voicemail).

It depends on how it works out, but I could see a model in the near future where the infrastructure and selling the service are split up. There's already a bunch of MVNOs (Mobile virtual network operators), and that will only grow. There will be a point where network operators are really just doing that: operating the network, not selling you minutes. That would allow network operators to focus on their core competence (or what should be their core competence), operating a good, reliable network. All too often now, the telecom industry feels like bait and switch or an extortion scheme...

On an aside note, there's a group of students here in the Netherlands that want to do that: setup a MVNO as a coop or a non-profit, that will essentially give you SIP/data of your calls, instead of handling routing from A-Z. See http://limesco.org/wordpress/, though most of it is in Dutch.

And getting back to Apple: an iPhone MVNO could work well. On the other hand, Apple has rules about selling iPhones on networks that make Apple like a carrier already: iPhone data has to be 2x as fast as any other comparable plan, etc. Apple has the carriers in their grip...

These sound like reasons for Apple not to do retail stores. :)

In fact, I think Apple has lots of room to win in these areas. From TFA, think how much waste there is in cell implementations for legacy/interop-- not to mention carrier overhead-- that could be eliminated if Apple made every single device on the network?

Apple is full-stack from today's perspective. What if tomorrow's "stack" includes the towers and the complete customer billing relationship? People might say this was an obvious step along the road to e-wallet phones.

I agree this feels a little far fetched. But so did AAPL becoming the world's largest company, and switch to x86, before the fact... :)

Also, Apple stands to gain even more dominance at the expense of carriers should next-gen wifi (802.22) ever take hold and make GSM data plans obsolete.