&gt; 1. didn&#x27;t see it then, don&#x27;t see it now. Then again I&#x27;m in europe, mayhaps US carriers were significantly more overbearing. I don&#x27;t recall carriers being good friends of the consumer though so not overly likely<p>The U.S. was indeed terrible: very restricted competition on phones (two year contracts, models often specific to one carrier, etc.), prohibitively high data rates and extreme barriers to entry for anyone trying to build a phone-based business.<p>Around 2000, I worked for a web company in San Diego where Qualcomm was trying to build a stable of companies developing mobile apps to boost demand for better hardware. We looked into the business model and each of the U.S. carriers wanted roughly $50K simply for the privilege of listing your app in their store plus a generous cut of the sales, should you have any and that number wasn&#x27;t fixed but based on what they thought you could afford so our better-known clients got estimates well into 6 figures, again simply for being listed.<p>Unsurprisingly, we looked at WAP instead but it was so limited in practice that we gave up and nobody I knew used WAP or J2ME apps. As far as I could tell, that only changed when Apple had enough clout to get AT&amp;T to go for a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie.