

Here is my dream: I go to the Verizon Wireless store with Franz Kafka. I tell the friendly salesperson that I want to upgrade my wife's cellphone. She looks up my information.

Kafka follows the exchange intently.

She explains to me that there are three numbers on my account, two of them phones and one of them a mobile broadband line. Each one has a contract with different termination time. My wife's phone is not yet eligible for a discounted price on a new phone. But we can get a discount on a phone. if we extend the contract of the broadband line for two more years. Depending on the phone I choose, the prices vary, but all of them require the filing of baffling rebate forms. If I don't like this I can end the contract. But ending a contract before the term expires will invoke a penalty that wipes out all discounts and puts me deep in the red.

At the rate our phones either die or need upgrading, my family will be bound to Verizon until well after the heat death of the universe.

"What if I buy the phone full-price?" I ask. "Do I pay the same rates, even though I'm not getting a discount for the phone?"

Yes. Same rates, even though I'm no longer amortizing a phone. By the way, she adds, the terms of the contract have changed, and my data charges have gone up.

And Kafka says: "This sucks."

The sad part of this dream is that I didn't make it up, except for the Kafka part. Cellphone carrier contracts are beyond broken – they're breaking us. Even as Apple has helped open up our smartphones to outside software providers, we are still prisoners of a business model that keeps us indentured to Verizon, chained to AT&T, shackled to Sprint every time we buy a phone that seems cheap on the day we buy it, but costs us much more over time.

Enter Google. When the company first announced it was making a mobile operating system called Android, the idea was that it would supply the system to manufacturers and networks, just like Microsoft does with Windows and computers.

But now Google is selling its own phone, called Nexus One. Andy Rubin, who heads up Android, says that the big reason Google is doing this is that the search giant is just as unhappy as we are with the way phones are sold. So Google is selling the Nexus unlocked, direct on its website. It costs $520 without a contract. It works on any network that takes a GSM SIM card. You find your carrier after the purchase.

As Kafka would have said, "Wunderbar!"

But hold on. At launch, the only carrier supporting the Nexus was T-Mobile, which was offering a two-year contract in exchange for a discount on the phone. Gee, that sounds familiar.

For Google's idea to work, the Verizons, T-Mobiles, Sprints and AT&Ts of the would have to compete vigorously to sign up the people who buy unlocked Nexus Ones and are looking for a carrier. This assumes that those carriers will want anything to do with customers who refuse to enter into contracts that are – to put it plainly – Kafkaesque.

I hope that they do want that business, and that they offer dirt-cheap, no-obligation plans for people who buy expensive, unsubsidized phones.

Does the Google gambit have the carriers shaking in their spectrums? My guess is no. Verizon and the rest don't have to worry about a mass exodus to Google's unlocked phones, because they have already locked their customers into those virtually perpetual contracts – the same endless contracts that Google wants to put an end to.

In my dream, Franz Kafka is laughing.

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