This might be well intentioned but it's a bad idea. See https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/101-indicted-transnatio... for why but the gist of it is that people use fake IDs to impersonate someone, get phones on credit, and make only the first payment. Then they sell it to a wholesaler who uses a sketchy connection to get the phone unlocked, Fedexes the phone to Hong Kong, and never pays again. Having to bribe rogue carrier employees for unlocks is a big cost center for these thugs.
By automatically unlocking by default you're doing their job for them and making this crime more profitable. And the victims in many cases don't spot the fraud until months later because not everyone is constantly checking their credit report. And it's not some isolated thing either. Literally ONE phone store / wholesaler in Texas bought and exported 100 million dollars worth of stolen phones in a couple of years.
The locking is also part of why new iPhones are even affordable to middle class people in the first place.
> The locking is also part of why new iPhones are even affordable to middle class people in the first place.
Verizon has been forced to unlock after 60 days by an agreement with the FCC for years now and they still offer similar subsidies as the other carriers.
Yeah but they might just be eating higher fraud losses. It used to be pretty much instant unlocking until they asked for a waiver to make it 60 days in 2019 (which was granted by the FCC with not much pushback). So clearly some delay is important. Given their previous agreement they might not have felt they could ask for a longer wait.
The FCC is proposing unlocks for phones that are not completely paid for yet. No one is against unlocking paid for phones. The lock is basically the only recourse the carrier has for nonpayment because blacklisting the IMEI doesn't matter if the phone goes to another country. I don't think you can relock a phone once it's unlocked, and the crooks typically make 1 or 2 payments which would cover the 60 days so by the time the carrier realizes the plan is in default they're not getting their money back.
1. Carrier locks prevent dual-SIM use where one SIM belongs to the locked carrier and the other does not. This is of no value for preventing unpaid phones from being taken overseas but has plenty of value for locking paying users in.
2. Carrier locks require a communication channel from the carrier to the lock database to the phone. With iPhones, for example, the whole mechanism is mediated by Apple. The same mechanism could absolutely prevent activation overseas — instead of having a “locked to carrier X” state and an “unlocked” state, have a “locked and cannot be used for non-emergency purposes” state, an “unlocked until time T” state, and a “fully unlocked” state. And this would even be simpler: it doesn’t require any integration with the baseband processor, so it could be implemented straightforwardly on the AP.
(Note that iPhones already have a locked-to-an-iCloud-account state and can be remotely locked out, which implements 95% of this.)
So, in summary, I do not believe that the current carrier lock scheme is honestly or competently designed as a theft-of-unpaid-phones prevention measure.
By automatically unlocking by default you're doing their job for them and making this crime more profitable. And the victims in many cases don't spot the fraud until months later because not everyone is constantly checking their credit report. And it's not some isolated thing either. Literally ONE phone store / wholesaler in Texas bought and exported 100 million dollars worth of stolen phones in a couple of years.
The locking is also part of why new iPhones are even affordable to middle class people in the first place.