Is the Washington State attorney general being paid off by AT&T? I'm joking, of course, but the investigation into T-Mobile's new service plans by the Washington attorney general's office plays right into the hands of AT&T and Verizon.

I've been cringing at the unecessary confusion around T-Mobile's new "uncarrier" service plans, but I guess that's what you get when you're trying to shift the paradigm for a brainwashed public. T-Mobile finally separated the price of a phone and the price of wireless service. Smaller prepaid carriers have been doing that for years, but T-Mobile is the first of the big national carriers to put its full weight behind the idea. Its new plans don't have contracts any more, and there's no termination fee. You can bring your own phone, buy one up-front, or get one with 0 percent financing on a 24-month loan.

That last bit is where T-Mobile ran into trouble. Never mind that almost everyone has bought a car like this. Never mind that installment plans (which this is) are a long-standing, American tradition of shopping.

The problem is, for the past several decades, the vast majority of Americans have been conned into thinking that they get a magic free phone with their service contract. And apparently the Washington State attorney general has been conned, too, because he can't tell the difference between buying a phone on an installment plan and a service contract.

The obtuseness of the attorney general's press release is appalling. The AG claims that T-Mobile had "deceptive advertising that promised consumers no annual contracts while carrying hidden charges for early termination of phone plans," which is completely false. It's a flat-out lie.

There's never a termination fee on T-Mobile's new plans. That's the whole point. But you have to have a phone, obviously. If you don't bring your own, you have to buy one. And if you buy it on an installment plan, you have to pay off the thing you bought, on the installment plan. Like a chair. Like a car. Like anything that anyone has ever bought on an installment plan in the past 100 years in America.

The point that the AG fixates on is that T-Mobile won't let you extend the installment plan payments beyond the length of your T-Mobile service. In other words, if you cancel service with T-Mobile, you have to pay off the phone. I think that's a fair complaint, and everyone should be clear on that. Ideally, people should start buying phones up front like they do in much of the rest of the world (and like we do with most other objects in our lives), and this would become a less relevant complaint.

The problem is that this valid complaint is buried several paragraphs down under false claims tearing down T-Mobile's attempt to change the way we buy phones. And the other carriers keep getting away with charging us extra monthly to recoup the subsidies on our "free" phones, even after we've paid them off.

The phone subsidy regime has distorted the U.S. wireless market for years, helping to keep us all under the thumb of the carriers, encouraging incompatibilities and suppressing innovation. Because carriers provide subsidies and a "free" phone is always more appealing than a $500 one, carriers have been able to decide what phones Americans get. Instead of 300 million customers deciding which phones are for sale, six or seven carriers make that call.

T-Mobile's installment plan is the best solution I've seen so far for finding a middle path between subsidies and high up-front prices, and the carrier is bravely striking out towards broader consumer freedom. It may need some tweaks, but tone-deaf, purposefully confusing investigations like the Washington AG's, no matter how well meant, don't help.

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