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Surely you mean "CDMA will die soon". That's the American technology behind the American idea of "this phone belongs to this carrier". The carrier decoupling that you see in Europe and elsewhere was enabled by GSM-family technologies (GSM, UMTS, LTE) and their use of SIM cards.

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American GSM carriers lock the phones too.

Right but the root problem is that I can't take my Verizon phone to AT&T because of hardware incompatibility.

There's not much sense in fighting for something that is largely irrelevant to most people.

Ahh, I actually hadn't realized Android was largely using two versions instead of putting the double radio chips in that handle both.

I believe there is a separate baseband firmware (drives radio chip) to the system firmware (Android; drives UI and operating system). My impression is that, in normal cases, the former is loaded in the factory and is never altered, and Android applications essentially view the network through a cellular-protocol-agnostic API.

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