Everybody knew were mobile telecom was heading ever since data became possible: downhill race to a commodity. You only had to look at Northen Europe or Japan to

Everybody knew were mobile telecom was heading ever since data became possible: downhill race to a commodity. You only had to look at Northen Europe or Japan to see how usage had changed. Everybody was scared. The idea that the telco controls what software you run was unknown there. Data is data. You could almost see operators taking the first steps from inflexible contracts where they gave phones away, to leasing-like models (for business customers, consumer markets went though the same change a few years later). The only surprising thing is that Apple didn't change telco business models more, but I guess they didn't have to. US telcos continued to sell phones through their own channels and didn't have to yield to bigger data plans until years later. But change is coming, because data by nature wants to be dumb. Soon all customers will find the idea of operator controlled phones just as foreign as some did ten years ago.