Telecom Market Competition

The problem is that they basically habe a nonaggression pact. You'll find either AT&T or T-Mobile in any given area; not both. This means that, if you don't like their prices or their service...well, what are you gonna do? Build your own telco?This lack of competition leads to a sort of mini-monopoly, meaning that they basically have no reason to not jack up prices.That is, until Google comes along and kicks them out, as another comment points out.

The “forcing” would likely come with conditions and some oversight. See how big phone companies in some countries are “forced” to allow competitors (eg. MVNOs) to connect to their networks at wholesale prices - do you think they chose that price point themselves?

What if the telcos won't allow anybody else to pay?

US telecom market is mostly a duopoly (AT&T + Verizon) with sprint and Tmobile fighting at the margins. Combine with a profoundly uneducated user-base (when it comes to phone technologies) makes the job of the numerous MVNO's (straight-talk/simple-mobile etc.) much harder. Most people I know, even many who work in the tech industry, don't quite understand the concept of buying a device and a carrier plan as separate things.This situation is not helped by the fact that the c

The telecom market isn't free, that's why

No; in fact, when AT&T switched from unlimited to metered bandwidth pricing for iPhone plans, 95% of customers (including me) saw that they had to pay less per month. The private market is simply not so broken for cellular telecoms right now that AT&T can charge a lot more than their costs for things like bandwidth: they are actually in fierce competition with Verizon, and for the vast vast majority of users the only thing they care about when choosing between these two companies is pric

What telecom giants? Isn't the problem more, like, Facebook/WA/Insta and Google/YT with their vertical integration (surfaces, ads, telemetry, endpoints) and the ones benefiting from Telecoms being restricted in their offerings of equivalent services on their networks?

Yeah, unfortunately there's not much you can do. The big telcos are so politically powerful that any individual market (especially if it's a smaller one) doesn't have much bargaining power. This isn't a problem specific to telcos; this just happens anywhere you have one large unified side negotiating with a number of fractured parties with different interests (and would likely be the same when dealing with a government bureaucracy vs. a telco.)

Problem is you can already by phones without contracts and carriers are in no rush to negotiate to lower prices. If intense competition you mean 20 carriers, I agree. But most countries have 1-3 carriers. And most haven't moved on price at all. They might add features and bandwidth, but rarely do you get a price break.

You are probably way too negative. Yeah, some telcos are looking for ways around it, and some plans will become a bit more expensive, temporarily. However, there is healthy competetion in most European telecoms markets. So it is very likely that over the mid term, competition will push prices down.Why is it so damn hard to be happy about a giant step forward, just because it doesn't happen in the most perfect way? (what does?!).