When the communists ruled the USSR, we saw a classic example of how an autocratic government becomes top-heavy. If those in control micro-manage every decision, every meal, job, and shoe the people wear, the government needs to grow very large to handle all the 'decision overhead'. At the same time, decisions themselves become scarce and thus one type of shoe is chosen for everyone to wear. Variety and choice are eliminated. The situation with wireless carriers and their Walled Gardens of content is very much the same.
These carriers seek to choose and control every bit of the content experience on their networks, and as such, are heavily burdened by the ever-growing responsibility of overseeing hundreds of developers and thousands of SKUs. But unlike Communist Russia, the telcos aren't growing their staff to handle the challenge (not being able to tax, they have to control costs, after all). Forcing developers into a Walled Garden on one hand, while on the other hand not having the resources to deal with them has the unpleasant side effect of pissing off the developer community. Verizon Wireless, because they've (un-necessarily) set themselves up for a big job which they're not equipped to handle, outsources the screening and quality-control of it's GetItNow content suppliers to an oustside company in another state. They've hired a gardener for their walled garden, but the gardener acts more as a gatekeeper with little interest in the garden! If your garden is truly important to you, at least you should fertilize the flowers and pluck the weeds yourself. Outsourcing (basically bad) decisions that you should never even be making to a 3rd party is a terrible way to manage content.