The carriers (again, in the U.S. in particular) are using Android’s openness to perform many of their same old tricks.

This is just incredibly woolly thinking, if not actually disingenuous.

Carriers have power to influence or dictate handset features because carrier promotions are the primary means of distribution for handsets, because they (not the handset manufacturers) own the consumer relationship, and because carrier subsidies are the only way anyone but power users will buy any but the cheapest phones. (This is true in the UK, and seems to be even more true in the US.) They'll exercise that power in some way.

In the case of dumbphones they do so by having their own brand dominate the manufacturer's, so consumers associate with their carrier instead of their handset manufacturer.

With "closed" smartphones (whatever "open" and "closed" mean, but let's assume the iPhone is "closed") they used to do so by only allowing customised and branded variants of the phones onto their networks. The iPhone was the first carrier-sold smartphone to take a stand against carrier customisation. This is one explanation for why the iPhone was so successful: most people's experience with every previous smartphone was actually of variants loaded with carrier crapware.

The iPhone is a desirable handset, and Apple has the marketing skills and brand to reach consumers directly, which takes back some of the bargaining power from the carriers, but it's hardly out from under their yoke. Most obvious piece of evidence: AT&T exclusivity in the US. The features you can use over WLAN but not 3G are also very likely to be carrier-influenced.

So how exactly does the "openness" of Android, whatever that means, help the carriers? They can read the source code... but why bother when they can dictate features directly to the handset manufacturers? They can install apps on the phones, even write custom apps... oh wait, they were doing that already. It's plausible Android might ship with some nicely documented compiler flags for carriers to switch off the features they don't want, rather than their engineers having to actually dive into the source drop they got from the handset manufacturer and disable the features themselves, but other smartphone platforms have been doing that for the last ten years - and anyway nobody is claiming Android is open because of its nicely documented feature killswitches.

The actual situation is that Android phones are getting loaded with carrier crapware and nerfs not because they're "open" (whatever that means), but because that's what's happened to all phones throughout history. The iPhone is an exception to some extent, not because it's "closed" (whatever that means), but because of Apple's ingenious strategy of actually giving a shit about the user experience, not to mention their world-class marketing department. The only way this ridiculous TechCrunchism makes any sense at all is if you're not really talking about "closed" vs "open", but "iPhone" vs "not iPhone".

So although the author protests that he has no skin in the game, this silly argument is actually yet another instance of the standard fanboy cry: "Why won't all these other handset companies just admit that Apple has won, and move into some other industry like flowerpots?" (Which is pretty irritating to anyone who doesn't think the game is over yet.)