If this goes through you won’t see any more subsidized planes without a locked in contract, or installment plans you’ll still be on the hook for. Not a bad thing, just don’t think there’s much merit in this unless you really have to jump. The original phone company will still get their money.

Scrotus will find a bullshit way to stop this.

Ban orphan kernels to stop all theft of ownership. The carrier is irrelevant. The control comes directly from the binary hardware support modules for the Linux kernel on the device. If that source code was merged into the kernel, your device would work for decades. Sure, you may not want to use them forever, bit all your old hardware would still have uses elsewhere and a real second hand market instead of miscellaneous junk drawer nostalgia trinkets.

Just want to note that this effectively doesn’t apply to Verizon because they already have such a rule, which was imposed over a decade ago as a condition of the 700MHz spectrum.

This means we already know such a rule works for carriers and we can apply it to the others.

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“Device locks” limit device functionality and should go away. The only obligation should be financial, not restrictive.

The amount of resources and time wasted on micromanaging device locks is a revenue killer… get rid of the customer pain point, eliminate this as a reason to contact, the money you save from this sure outweighs the money wasted policing this ridiculous policy. Any device sold should be compatible with any major carrier… let’s make them compete for our business!!!

Maybe now people will see how much cell phones actually cost.