Apple has saved me the cost of an iPhone. I’ll be renewing my Sprint contract for a year when it expires next month. Just five days ago Apple played the pro-consumer card when they dropped NBC’s television shows from the iTunes store; NBC proved Apple’s point by promptly signing up for Amazon’s far more restrictive Unbox service. Now, less than a week later, they’ve lost that cred. They are asking consumers to pay again for music they’ve already purchased. They’ve announced that even if you already own the song, you’ll need to pay again to use it as a ringtone.

When I wrote about ringtones in June, they were a proxy for the real question, will Apple continue to make their devices for consumers, or will they succumb to the same greed that has seduced the music industry and the rest of the cellphone industry?

We got an inkling of the answer last week when Ambrosia—a great software company—introduced iToner. That software’s only purpose is putting ringtones on the iPhone, “the official way”. That would be a pretty short product life if Apple were about to announce consumer-friendly ringtones directly in iTunes. Ambrosia president John Welch claimed not to have any inside knowledge:

We’re betting that they will charge for [ringtones], because of their contracts with AT&T (they likely have a revenue sharing model for ringtone sales). However if we’re wrong, and they make a great general-purpose ringtone program that works with any audio files (purchased or not), then we wasted our time.

Looks like they bet right.

At the last Apple press event, a journalist took heat for admittedly a pretty lame question. This time around, there was no question and answer session. I would have liked to see the question “When you introduced the iTunes Music Store, you said When you own the music it never goes away. You can listen to it however you want. What changed your mind?”

Where does it stop? If you have to pay extra to hear your music when someone calls you, will you also eventually have to pay extra to listen to it in your car? To play your videos on your TV set? To use a music track over your wedding video? As an alarm when iTunes wakes you up in the morning?

Apple usually does a good job of dreaming the dreams of consumers. This is what turned the iTunes Music Store into the powerhouse it currently is: while everyone else was trying to nickel-and-dime consumers with rental schemes, Apple came out and sold them music. But the cell phone industry and the music industry dream of nickels and dimes, of per-use and even per-listen charges. After the iPhone came out with no means of easily adding custom iPhone ringtones, I wrote,

This is the intersection of the cell phone industry and the music industry. Anything that screws consumers is possible.

Apple can make this mistake once or twice, but if they continue down this road, they’ll find that people no longer care when an NBC switches to someone else, like Amazon, who is also willing to sell out the consumer. Welcome to the shallow trench, Apple.