Could transparency be enough to fix mobile carrier exclusivity?

I was just thinking about what back room wrangling may have gone on to have the iPad contract-free 3G service through AT&T happen.

Obviously, as a book reader, Apple could offer the Kindle up for comparison, and Steve could certainly make the case that ubiquitous connectivity would have to be better than that offered by the Kindle to make his device transcendent. He could get people to pay for that transcendence — it was going to be a premium experience, so people would pay for it. But people hate cell phone companies, and contracts in particular… so it had to be easy to enable and disable, with the option to bump up your plan if you’re running over, without the possibility that you’d get a $5000 bill from AT&T because you left a video stream going.

Steve had a few things to offer up. First, he’d go along with the whole mini-SIM thing to appease AT&T. People couldn’t use their iPhone SIM in their iPad, so they’d have to get the additional service. They’re not going to get rid of their iPhones — you can’t carry the iPad everywhere. Average revenue per Apple fanboi would go up, and with the simplified pricing plans and self-service provisioning, the cost of servicing the additional load is just a technical problem, something that can be solved by using money.

So Steve might have said, “OK, we’ll tell Verizon to screw off, make it so people can’t just use the one subscription for iPhone and iPad, and increase your ARPU. You give us a self-serve no-hassle unlimited-use option and another at a lower price for those who aren’t yet sure how much they’ll love our magical boogie board. And this iPhone 4? It’s gonna be awesome, too, and bring even more folks into the iPhone fold. It’s going to do Skype, so invest in the data side, and you can even drop your spending on the voice side. You do this for us, and we’re going to make you THE carrier of mobile data. Buy the towers, buy the routers, run the fiber — just be ready.”

It seems logical to me to have gone that way. Even if the details are off a bit, we can’t know.

One of the most troubling things about exclusivity agreements is that we know so little about them.

When does an exclusivity agreement between market leaders turn into anticompetitive collusion? Isn’t the team of Apple and AT&T almost its own vertically-integrated market monolith?

Additionally, the terms of such agreements are obviously incredibly material to the financial health of both companies, and investors are prevented from accurately gauging corporate prospects without access to that data.

It would seem to me that disclosure of such terms should be required to be disclosed publicly, with well-defined regulation around what can be redacted, and what the allowed reporting delay can be after contract execution.

I’ll admit that I’d be happy to see the side effect of increased competition when the light is shined into dark corners. I’d love to see service providers competing on the price and value of their service, rather than relying on exclusivity agreements and paying kickbacks. They should be competing for my business, not Apple’s.