Technology

The FCC is the one taking away people’s freedom here, by preventing users from entering the kind of contract that T-Mobile and AT&T are offering.

Consenting adults are happy to sign up on those terms, and the FCC is proposing to prevent that arrangement.

The carriers make an excellent point that without that lock-in, the sale of the phone is less valuable to them. This means they won’t be able to offer the heavy subsidies on phones any longer.

This is the government preventing contracts between consenting adults. The government is reducing freedom here.

Yes you signed a contract. That contract has a certain value to it, and that value offsets the cost to them of the phone.

On your side, the fact that this contract came with a subsidized phone made it worth it to you.

What the carriers are saying is that this set of interrelated contracts won’t be available, and so these terms won’t be worthwhile to the parties involved, leading to a change in future contracts. Namely, the service contracts will have to be more expensive to them, which will make them less valuable to you, which will make them less likely to happen.

It's just a lie. I don't think it's meant to hold up to scrutiny, it's just meant to be repeated.

That's exactly right. Users will have to purchase phones on credit like we do for every other major (and sometimes minor) purchase. This doesn't change the relationship between carriers and their customers at all. It only changes their accounting.

Bonus points: In Germany all phones come unlocked, regardless if you get them with a contract or not, and we still get much better discounts on the phones than in America.

Often times the total cost of the 24 month contract ends up being cheaper than buying the phone without a contract, so you essentially end up with a free phone plan

Are you suggesting that there are some lies involved in this? If so, you shouid be specific about which lies you’re referring to. Without the specifics this just seems like FUD.

isnt lying to court felony?

I've done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans and even do things like use a local SIM card whilst abroad to avoid roaming costs.

You know what the difference between a near monopoly and an actual monopoly is?

In one scenario there’s competition and in the other one there’s not. Basically one’s a monopoly and the other isn’t.

It's always the same argument. "This objectively bad thing for consumers is actually good for consumers because it allows us to offer a lower price!"

No, dipshits, you are choosing to make your product shittier than necessary and charging customers to undo your shittery. That's not some external thing, it's something that you chose.

Gaslighting?

What exactly is “good faith commerce”?

That doesn’t seem to register as a coherent concept, considering good faith has to do with considering the whole of the interaction instead of one’s own side, and business is when each person handles only their own side of the equation.

Seems like an empty phrase to me, unless you can enlighten me.

My T-Mobile phone that's been unlocked and moved over to Google Fi has the T-Mobile image whenever you start up the phone. I'll only buy phones directly from the manufacturer now.

Freedom is slavery.

It was probably incompetence more than malice but T-Mobile customer service incorrectly told me multiple times that I was not allowed to pay off my phone balance early to unlock it. I'm on US Mobile now and I'll never go back to postpaid.

and behold all of the terrible consequences!

1. "Handset" is obfuscating legalese to refer to a cell phone in a way intending to distance the meaning of the word from the thing that the old and technologically illiterate people who rule on this use every day.

2. I'm no fan of their strategy, but cell phone providers have claimed for a long time that filling your phone with unremovable bloatware causes the overall price to decrease. Their argument is most likely that they will have to charge more once the propagators of that bloatware realize that they can no longer force it on people and wedge that as a reason to pay less to carriers.

3. The reality is that cell phones are priced based on what people will buy anyway and carriers pocket as much of the money as they can that third parties pay them for their bloatware. Ultimately because of that this ruling hurts their bottom line, but the above reasoning gives plausible deniability in the face of the law as it is interpreted by old technologically illiterate lawmakers

This is talking about carrier locked phones, not locked bootloaders.