I think AT&T and telephone business are a bad analogy, exactly because Google kind of is involved in the telephone business and does not apply these stratagems there.

For me the point of the article is the strategy Mr. Google uses currently in other fields: They offer you a product for free, a product way better that other (even paid) offerings, to capture the market and to collect data and serve ads inside those products. This doesn´t apply to Android so much, but take Gmail, Google Maps, Search, YouTube. All these services are ostensibly given away for free (like AT&T phones in the article), but have their performance compromised by ads everywhere plus they siphon the user data like a vacuum.

So to paraphrase your criticism: Google doesn´t sell its maps, but pushes the paid listing with larger map icons. Google doesn´t sell its search, but gives adverts when you´d expect the honest best result for your query. Google doesn´t sell the videos (barring the paid offerings), but prepends and interrupts them with ads.

This article just applies these tactics to something we are so familiar with - the phone service.

>>services with near-zero marginal cost

I might be loking at this from the point of view of current, digital, automated and interconnected networks, but the way I see it, a phone network has near-zero marginal costs, too. Once you have built the network, your marginal cost per-call are quite low. I´d say comparable to relaying an email or replying to a search query once the infrastructure is in place.