For a long time I have been frustrated by the bizarre mobile data download limit of 50mb (which Apple periodically increase) on iPhones and 3G capable iPads.  Apple does not provide the consumer with the option to turn this limit off.  Now I see that with iOS 7 they have also included this limit in the hotspot/tethering.

I believe that this limit is not in place out of concern that us "irresponsible consumers" who will download to much and clearly need apple to interfere with our data consumption.  If that was the case they would provide the option to turn it on or off as they do with data roaming.  The only people who would benefit from this inflexible restriction would be the cell phone companies who rely on consumers only using a fraction of the data packages they sell to them.  Therefor it is my strong suspicion that Apple is involved in a form of "mobile data consumption fixing" to restrict consumers making effective use of the data allowances they pay their cellular providers for. 

In short if the restriction was just to protect us, it would be identical to the data roaming scenario, yet Apple intentionally does not provide an option to activate or deactivate this restriction as they do in data roaming which will always fall outside of a prepaid/contracted data allowance.  Which is very suspect indeed. 

Consumers are restricted from using the mobile Data they have paid for and have to use the wifi data they pay another company for.

I believe the mobile phone companies pay apple to implement the mobile data download restriction of 50 or 100mb.  I never understood why when a customer pays a company for say 1GB of mobile data, the company does not allow the customer to link their laptop to the phone and use that data.  Surely the data belongs to the consumer and can be used as he/she sees fit?  But of course that is just the point, they do not want them to be able to make full use of the data and as the most likely consumption of data would be via app download (they are getting bigger all the time) Apple and cell companies are scratching each others back here by forcing the client to use wifi instead.

What do you think? Is this unfair business conduct?