As I've mentioned before, I really like the Technology Liberation Front. My own ability to maintain righteous indignation over the DMCA waxes and wanes, and it's good to know that someone's holding down the fort.

But I do occasionally find their posts frustrating, and none more so than when they talk about the cell phone market. Too often their objections to regulation in this industry seem to boil down to, "If there was enough consumer demand to justify a market for having a free market, the market would have selected for it! Market!" I appreciate their enthusiasm for capitalism, and it's a good reminder for a legislation-happy liberal like myself. But you'd have to be completely insane to think that the American cell phone market is open in a way that offers meaningful choice to consumers.

And, courtesy of Michael, here comes a reminder of that fact. This one concerns a free conference call service that we use at work:

Dear FreeConference User:

AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, and Qwest Are Blocking Your Conference Calling As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".

Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you. Don't Let AT&T/Cingular, Sprint, or Qwest Take Away Your Right to Use the Conference Service of Your Choice!

We Need Your Help! Please Take the Actions Below:

etc. etc.

Now, maybe it's not foul play. Lately there's been a rash of non-toll-free numbers attracting huge amounts of inbound traffic in order to exploit legislative loopholes. Maybe FreeConference.com was accidentally lumped in with them and the blocking will be temporary. Maybe they all resell POTS access from the same provider, who's accidentally blacklisted freeconference.com. Or maybe not.

Either way, we're kind of screwed until the carriers deign to fix the problem. Our clients can't reliably call in to the service, and getting them to switch cell phone carriers is of course not a plausible solution. In fact, even for those of us who use the service daily, selecting against the crooked carriers wouldn't make any sense — termination fees, locked handsets, an occasional lack of synching tools... Yes, I can imagine a world in which consumers rise up and demand an end to these lousy practices — it's just that it's clearly a fantasy world. And I don't buy that cell customers' unwillingness to grab pitchforks and torches and march down to Cingular HQ means that we somehow don't deserve the better and more flexible service that we say we want.

But instead of punishing the companies that have screwed up, we'll be forced to switch conferencing providers. Which, if the freeconference.com people are to be believed, is exactly what the networks are conspiring to accomplish.

Now compare the situation to my VoIP vendor. If I'm using an open protocol (and, since my home Asterisk server speaks SIP, I am), the decision to switch vendors is as simple as googling for a new provider, filling out a web form and altering a configuration file to match the credentials that will have been emailed to me. That's how it ought to be: if Cingular starts screwing you over, forward your calls to the T-Mobile trial account you just set up — all it'd take is changing a few settings on your handset. If you like it, switch for good for whatever the current, reasonable number-portability fee is.

Is that kind of flexibility really so unimaginable? And would it be so terrible to legislate it into existence? I'm not saying we should dictate technical implementations to carriers, but surely discouraging their lockin-focused contract scheme would improve competition.