Five years after the iPhone, carriers are the biggest threat to innovation

And carriers rarely want what’s best for their customers. “The carriers have always been wary of ‘excessive’ innovation in the mobile space because of the danger that it might make mobile service cheaper,” says Columbia Law School professor and The Master Switch author Tim Wu. If companies like HTC and Samsung were able to compete directly at the consumer level, the carriers would turn into dumb pipes — and AT&T and Verizon would be forced to raise their service levels and lower their monthly fees to effectively compete against each other.