South Korean carrier wants to eliminate the middleman

Cellphone carriers already have a complicated relationship with the companies that actually make cellphones, with the carriers always trying to make sure that customers' first allegiance is to them not the company that made the phone they buy. It's why they like to slap their logos on everything, lock the phones so they can't be (readily) used with another carrier, and do their best to restrict which ones we can buy in the first place. There are tons of no-name Asian manufacturers pumping out relatively decent phones that will let anyone who pays slap whatever brand name they want on their handsets, which means there's really nothing stopping the carriers from just cutting out the major manufacturers entirely and only offering Sprint brand cellphones or T-Mobile brand cellphones or whatever. (Well, there is one obstacle: lots of customers would be pissed about how cruddy the phone selection would be.)

Anyway, we're not exactly dying to give Verizon, Sprint, Cingular, et al. even more control over these things, but they might start to look at the example of SK Telecom, a South Korean cell carrier, which isn't just looking to rebrand somebody else's phones, they're looking to just buy a cellphone manufacturer outright, probably Maxon Telecom. Ideally it'd mean that they could offer their subscribers even cheaper cellphones, but as Mike Masnick notes in The Feature, it could also alienate anyone who wants a different/better model of phone.