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I really missed the good ol' days where, if you had the right feature phone, you could pay VZN $3-4 dollars to put a song on it. /s

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Are you suggesting that Verizon should have given you that feature for "free"? In that case, they would have either passed that cost on to every customer, or not had that feature at all, taking it away from those who were willing to pay for it.

That's not what I get from parent's comment.

I think the parent was implying that large telco interests have a dubious track record when it comes to the balance between investing in capacity vs. rent-seeking.

Is $3-4 is a fair price for access to a song, at a time when Apple was selling it for a dollar?

You couldn't connect a phone to Verizon's network unless Verizon sold it to you.

The phones they sold had the firmware configured to prohibit adding content from any source other than their store, which sold it at an extremely high cost.

Ah, I thought they were referring to buying a song-ringtone. Still, it's not the government's business to be telling Verizon they must sell for $1 or allow competition into their ecosystem.

I believe it is their business to act on price gouging, which that most definitely was.

It should never have been something you could only do through Verizon. Verizon didn't build the phones. So why should Verizon have any say in what I put on my phone (as long as it doesn't affect their network)?

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