We, as youthful, up-and-coming, paying consumers, the generation that will usher in the transition from pocket protectors to six-shooter cell phones, need to make it very clear where we stand on getting things for free. And I’ll be the first to say it, “we like it.”

Music once cost too much money, so we made a way for it to be free. The industry took notice and now you can buy a song for $1. Internet cafes were charging $5 / hour to sit down and use their computers, we didn’t like it, and now competition has driven half the coffee shops in my area to give WiFi away for free to incent customers to stop in for a drink. And thanks to Google, my email, maps, datebooks, 411 and (in San Francisco) Internet connection are all free. Say something, get noticed. Flappers, beatniks, hippies and punks have all done it before us, and now it’s our turn to involve ourselves in a cultural revolution, one that works to eliminate the idea that you pay to wear a company’s ad on your shirt or buy a movie ticket and have to watch commercials before the show.

So it baffles me that telephone companies are still so blind to the invention of their own inevitable downfall. Verizon, a major telephone carrier (and a regional monopoly) in the US, managed to make it illegal for local governments to offer competitive Internet connections. That’s a corporation telling a government that it has to pass a law prohibiting that government from ending the corporations monopoly. And now that same company, and its sisters across the nation, want to charge websites for sending us information across the bandwidth we’re already paying for.

Add to that the plans cell phone providers have to force manufacturers into making phones that can only download music from their network at $1.50 a pop (as opposed to a free market download schema or grabbing music via Bluetooth or USB from your computer). Plus, they have an additional agenda: slowly roll out advertising on your cell phone. How does phone calls + advertising work on a screen half the size of a playing card?

Like any industry who abuses its power, only a backlash by customers can change this. It took most of the 1980s and 90s to put Big Music back in place once it established its fair price, don’t let Big Telecom take their place.