Few people in the US seem to understand how broken and consumer-adverse their dependence on carriers and their subsides are.
It does not help that most US tech sites give the carry subsided prices instead of the true retail cost. For example a review of the iPhone will have a price of $200 instead of $700.
It's getting there. AT&T's pushing their new Mobile Share Value plans pretty hard now, and those are essentially contract-free and directly give you back a $25 subsidy on each phone. You can use Next to spread the payments for your phone over two years, but it's not required.