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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000·

They could be doing this already if they wanted to. I agree they shouldn't have this ability in the first place, but this doesn't change anything.

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They can't do that with physical SIMs, because at least in the EU, there are regulations against that (to regulate stuff like phones and SIMs locked to each other)

I couldn't find that regulation and looking at wikipedia regulations about that are country specific:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock#European_Union

It seems sim locking is legal, but unlocking has to be allowed after some time.

I couldn't see anything that would differentiate between a carrier lock by esim vs a sim.

By EU law, the vendor of the phone has to provide updates for N year. There is no such regulation for SIM cards. ( Provided by telco's ) This means the vendor of the phone, not the telco, can simply say "we did our N years of updates", rendering the phone useless as esim requires it in order to function. It's beyond the power of the telco, because it did not provide the esim. It's not a "SIM lock", it's far more devious.

I don't believe such a law exists on the EU level.

That could be bad, I would have never thought of that implication.

I'm not sure that would happen wouldn't most telcos be interested to allow as many users on the network as possible?

People whose devices get obsoleted by eSIM won't suddenly drop off the grid - they'll go and buy a new phone, because being on the mobile network is almost a requirement in most of the world these days.

With the above in mind, note that it just so happens that telcos sell mobile devices as well as the service. This means they'll make money on increasing device churn.

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