After a brief stint of illegality, it now seems increasingly likely that Americans will regain the right to unlock their phones. The White House sent a petition to the Federal Communications Commission yesterday seeking to rewrite the rules and force mobile carriers to let consumers take their phones to a rival network. A bill working its way through Congress would do more or less the same thing and has drawn support from the wireless industry.
Carriers put locks on phones to customers from defecting. A rule change wouldn’t bring absolute freedom since some networks, like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T’s (T) are technically incompatibly. Circumventing a lock on a phone has been illegal since January after a federal copyright office rescinded a cellphone exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The White House and U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, want to reverse that move. “By giving customers greater freedom to choose among alternative mobile service providers and use wireless devices that they lawfully acquire from others, the proposed rule would both increase competition in the mobile services market and enhance consumer welfare,” wrote the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the president’s principal adviser on this policy.
It will also come as good news for the second-hand phone market, which is gathering increasing steam due to trade-in programs and other moves by phone companies and retailers. A rule requiring carriers to unlock phones would make second-hand devices more valuable because people could take them to any compatible network. Carriers already offer to unlock their customers’ phones under certain conditions. But AT&T, for example, will only do it for the person who bought the phone originally. The White House wants to allow anyone who has legally acquired a secondhand phone to have it unlocked, although the new regime wouldn’t keep carriers from setting penalties for customers seeking to unlock before finishing their service contracts.
The CTIA, a trade group for the wireless industry, has warned that lowering restrictions to unlocking phones could also benefit the stolen-phone industry because the same things that make used phones more valuable make stolen phones more valuable. But it has changed tact over the course of the year, and is pushing for Goddlatte’s bill.
“No one seems to be opposed to unlocking. It just seems to be the extent of that unlocking,” said Chris Lewis of the digital rights advocacy group Public Knowledge.
Phones aren’t the only thing you could unlock, however, and Lewis is among those who want to push further. And unlocking issues have already popped up in other industries. Massachusetts passed a law last year requiring car dealerships to provide independent auto repair shops with the information needed to unlock computerized systems. Lewis also cites consumers ripping DVDs in order to watch movies on their iPads or security researchers breaking software locks to prod for vulnerabilities among the legal problems that could be solved by loosening the DMCA.
U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat, introduced another bill earlier this year that would allow people to unlock any technology so long as they weren’t doing so to infringe on a copyright. It hasn’t proven as compelling as the phone-unlocking issue, however, and seems to have died on the vine.
