I am sorry, but what? You can just remove the association of the eSIM with the telephone and activate it in another. There is no lock in here.
The e-SIM provisioning process is under the control of the carrier. They give you a QR code (or SM-DP string) which you scan/enter, your phone then contacts the carrier and after some back and forth acquires cryptographic keys which are stored in the eSIM chip.
There is no way to extract these cryptographic keys and enter them into another phone. Instead, you have to repeat the whole process and get a new QR code from the carrier. They may charge for this, or just be a pain in general and make it difficult or refuse for whatever reason.
I can see them taking advantage of this to prevent travellers using local SIMs for example - sure you can delete your eSIM and get a local one, but getting your own eSIM back will be difficult or outright impossible if you're still travelling (they may require physical ID verification, etc).
I’m not sure why nextgrid is constructing this weird technological strawman.
With eSIM, not only are they in control of switching eSIMs between devices but it also gives them a clean slate to introduce the aforementioned network-level restriction under excuses such as security (though again since they're in control of switching eSIMs they can just block it there or be annoying in other ways - some carriers already charge for reissuing eSIMs despite it being a completely automated process).
Even worse, in many real cases. Let me give you an example, happened to me this October:
I get a new phone. I browse my carrier's website to find out how to transfer the eSim to the new one, but find nothing. I call them, they tell me it's impossible. I ask them to double check because this doesn't seem realistic - after one day of internal checks, they contact me saying they found a way! I just have to request to be migrated back to a physical SIM (costing me 15 EUR and 1 week of waiting), and when it will arrive I'll be able to migrate it to an eSIM again!
Isn't technology amazing?
This was in Germany, the operator is Congstar, an MVNO using Deutsche Telekom's network.
Utter nonsense. There's no technical requirement to get a new QR code, this is up to the carrier.
Why are there so many people spreading straight up lies in this thread?
When I wanted to move to a new phone, I simply deleted the data profile from my old phone and scanned the QR code on the new one, as the provider suggested. It just worked.
Some commenters here are correctly saying that the carrier could technically prevent physical SIMs from being moved between phones by restricting which IMEIs are connecting to the network, but that's not usually done and there's an established convention that SIM cards can be moved around. eSIM gives them a blank slate to start over and break that convention without much backlash.
Which kind of highlighted that it was a dark-pattern that only served to trick customers.
Kind of reinforces the notion that we should be worried...