Apologies for the link - requires a subscription if you don't hit it from a Google search for "Wal-Mart Expands Cheap No-Contract Wireless Plan". Thanks Rupert.
"Cloaking" is a naughty SEO tactic of showing one thing (like an article) to search engines and a different thing (like a login screen) to humans. Google bans cloaking; their punishment is de-indexing. But there is a loophole: showing the same thing to Googlebot and regular browsers with a Google referer isn't considered cloaking. The NY Times also uses this technique.
I can't tell you why you're out of the loop, though.
Silly newspapers. They want to charge for content but can't bear the thought of losing traffic. So they keep the door open to non-subscribers through Google, and hope subscribers (or potential subscribers) won't find out.
Living in Europe, I'm amazed that $30/$45 for non-handset tariffs are considered "ultra cheap", especially as landline services have historically been far more expensive in Europe than the other side of the Atlantic. What exactly is stopping carriers in the US from providing cheaper services? I gather network coverage/signal quality isn't even that great in populated areas, so is the lesser population density really that much of a burden? Or should I be thinking 'nefarious anti-competitive behaviour'?
There's a history in the US of the government giving large corporations money to do something, but then not attaching any requirements to it. So the corporations, obviously, act in their own best interest. Communication networks that otherwise wouldn't have existed are built on taxpayer money, and the company that controls it is now in a hugely advantageous position, having been "bootstrapped" on someone else's dollar.
s/attaching/enforcing/ at least in some instances, e.g. with SBC now renamed AT&T (ignore the purchased name; the culture is SBC). They, along with, I believe, the other "baby Bells" and perhaps some other entrenched interests, received hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions, in return for pledges of network build-out and competitors' access to their physical networks.
They then progressively reneged on those pledges, and hired lobbyists to push legislative changes to eliminate their obligations.
It's another aspect of what is in the U.S. commonly termed "corporate welfare". Or corruption. Choose your moniker.
That's not even the whole story, in the US people routinely pay for 'airtime', in other words you pay too when you are being called. In Europe that usually only happens when you are abroad.
As to your question, given that infrastructure is a fixed cost that can be amortized over more calls as call volume goes up (there are very few bits/second involved in a phone conversation, once you hit the tower nearest you the cost of a single conversation is very small) my guess is that price gouging is a huge factor here.
For even more fun think about what it costs to handle an SMS and compare that with the amounts paid.
Telcos are great at selling bits at ridiculous markups.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091014-711422.html
Posted article is fairly shallow, and this deserves some better analysis.