Nothing's stopping Sony (or more likely, retailers) from offering a payment plan for your hypothetical $1200 PlayStation, just like the phone carriers do for ha

Nothing's stopping Sony (or more likely, retailers) from offering a payment plan for your hypothetical $1200 PlayStation, just like the phone carriers do for handsets. The difference is that they extract the money directly from the consumer, who can make an informed decision about it that has market impact, rather than on the back-end through strongarm deals with the publishing companies where the consumer has no direct influence. I would say that carrier locked phones are undeniably anti-consumer though, and they are banned in many jurisdictions. Their sole purpose is to add friction and give the customer less choice, and due to 'collusion' between the few carriers that exist, impossible to avoid, even if you did choose to purchase the phone outright; it's practically the definition of anti-consumer. The phone purchase should be a separate contract, with a defined monthly payment against the retail price of the phone. Offering this is a profitable enterprise for BestBuy etc. on other electronics, so why not phones? The user should be free to switch carriers with little friction, to maintain as competitive a market as possible in a market that is a natural monopoly. It reminds me a lot of the equipment monopoly in the Bell System until the early '80s.