There are other countries that bill for incoming calls. I know of at least Singapore that does it.

Also, your phone provider does get charged for each incoming call. They just eat/redistribute that cost, since for normal phone user it's likely to be less than a penny per month. But try running a conference service and you're definitely going to get billed for incoming calls (apart from some weird force-subsidised areas where you can get paid to receive calls)

U.S. consumers think it's extremely unfair that a poor guy with a landline should subsidize the rich guy with the cell phone or the satellite phone. It might cost me $1 a minute to call my neighbor? No thanks!

Don't you mean caller pays? Otherwise I could make someone else spend money just by calling them.

For POTS, only the caller gets charged.

If you are using a cell phone or a satellite phone, you pay for your connection to that network, whether or not you started the call.

You certainly don't make it so that grandma using her POTS has to pay for the guy with the more expensive connection. That is viewed as extremely unfair.

OTOH, using the cell network generally has free calling to anywhere in the lower 48. It's not the old physical wires that are the expensive part, it's maintaining and upgrading all the cell towers, and so people pay for that usage. Once you've paid to connect your call to the wired network, you can do whatever within very wide geographic borders.

Actually, they do (on that last point). Which is why Google Voice won't route calls to certain numbers. It's called a termination fee, which works like this: I pay my local phone company, and also pay a long distance carrier. When I call you, your local phone company charges the long distance carrier a fee, which that carrier then passes on to me. (Well, it used to work this way, but almost everything is flat rate now).