For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

This is in line with what I’ve been hearing from old friends still at the Mothership. I especially liked the anecdote later in the article about AT&T trying to enforce a dress code on Steve. Can you imagine?

More to the point, my same sources tell me that during early discussions in the year leading up to the release of the original iPhone, Verizon was even worse in their treatment of Apple in general and Steve in particular.