You're mostly right with your reasoning, but I don't think that will stop it from happening.

The original discussions between Apple and Verizon broke down because Verizon wasn't willing to give "ownership" of the customer to Apple. Verizon leverages (or used to leverage) its channel to nickel and dime its subscribers (e.g. disable bluetooth file browsing so they can charge you 25 cents to export a photo via an email to yourself or extort a monthly PictureMail package from you). Apple wanted none of that; they wanted a different uncluttered experience for iPhone users, and AT&T was more than willing to let them have it in exchange for exclusivity.

With Android, Verizon has started to loosen its grip on the subscriber a bit: a non-Verizon app store (The Marketplace) was a huge step for them. Remember, a few years ago, Verizon phones were much more limited. In fact, as a policy, Verizon refused WiFi capability for any phone on their network. I remember having discussions with their enterprise sales teams where they'd say things like, "Why would you ever want to waste your time and money building out a WiFi network when we've built the most reliable 3G network with coverage everywhere?" Umm... simultaneous voice and data, best path call routing with fixed-mobile convergence, coverage sucks in some buildings, etc. They've since realized that WiFi is a great way to offload some data traffic and maintain a more constant QoS for their customers. Anyway, this, along with attitudes toward Bluetooth and VoIP have changed, largely due to the influence of Android and Google.

On a side note, Google has been slacking a bit as a partner for Verizon. Verizon has been pushing and pushing them to make certain changes to the platform to make it more "enterprise ready" (e.g. device-wide policy enforcement, encrypted storage, for a couple), and it's taking too darn long. So, MOT and VZW have started to take some of this into their own hands, because their enterprise customers are telling them "no droids until they are at least as secure as the iPhone, but ideally as secure as Blackberry". Perhaps bringing another Android competitor into the stable will spur Google into action.

Anyway, my point is that Verizon is much more "open" than it used to be, but don't mistake "open" for FOSS in this discussion -- Verizon doesn't give a crap about that. They are simply more willing now to allow customers and partners to do more with their network, because they've proven to themselves that their network quality is enough to maintain retention and grow sales. So whereas before Verizon wanted no part of the Apple/iTunes/iPhone experience for fear of dilution of their brand and services, now they've "grown up", you could say, and they are willing to just Be The Network for some of their customers. Because, in the end, customers are customers.

Now after I've said all that, all my contacts at Apple and AT&T remind me that it was a 5 year deal for exclusivity, and that takes us into 2012. However, what they don't know is whether the iPad 3G deal modified that original agreement or not.

...and I really hope they put something - anything - on it besides Windows 7. The hardware is actually pretty nice - standard USB and SD card slots and a dock with more USB and an HDMI port.

Good analogy, but it's no secret. Google is more than happy to take your open source, contributed works and use them for profit. It's free engineering work on components that just aren't very useful without all the proprietary other parts, and as long as there are corporate fanboys out there willing to do it, Google and Apple would be stupid to not take advantage of it.

I am a little disturbed that I cannot find reference to any way that the site owner can "opt out" of having a sidewiki hooked to their pages. At least with Microsoft SmartTags, there was a way to disable them with a meta tag in the html header, and unlike Microsoft, Google has enough geek fanboys who think Google shits gold out there to make this feature take off.

I used to have comments enabled on my Flickr photos, but jokers kept on leaving suggestive remarks about my wife (she's pretty hot, IMHO). So, I turned it off. When talking about this with a colleague yesterday, we came up with the "ugly kid" scenario:

Imagine you have a family site with pictures of your kids on it and some jerk writes, "man, you have ugly kids" on the sidewiki. What do you do? You can't remove it. Will it be filtered out automatically by Google with their so-called "quality algorithm"? Just because there will be no anonymous posts, don't think that people won't do things like this.

Seriously, has anyone seen anything about a way to turn this off for your site? I'm not against free speech and all that, just don't add it to *my* content without my permission. Whether sidewiki is considered part of the page content is academic: the visitor will see it attached to your page.