Obama administration urges FCC to require carriers to unlock mobile devices | Hacker News Reader

Obama administration urges FCC to require carriers to unlock mobile devices

washingtonpost.com

185 pointshanapbuhay85 comments

So, just a quick bit of context here. While the NTIA ask for a rulemaking from the FCC is awesome, we'll see whether the FCC actually act upon it. Based on the most recent statement from the FCC, they're still trying to get carriers to come to a voluntary agreement (i.e. regulate themselves) which would mean less work for the FCC.

Either way, the real issue at the heart of unlocking is fixing the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, which would open up the market so that private parties can freely develop and distribute unlocking software. We've been lobbying for this in DC making some degree of progress, but even the best legislation out there right now is quite far from perfect.

They are not going to change anything related to the DMCA as part of this. It is totally just posturing, and get ready for more of it- they need a lot of PR for people to forget that Putin made Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, look like a warmongering asshole. That and the naval base shooting has made for a rough past 2 weeks on the administration.

But I think that everyone should seize this opportunity to make them put their money where their mouth is. Demand to your senators and the administration that not only allow device unlocking, but allow choosing cable channels we want to pay for, get rid of all unwarranted software and tech patents, make digital rights management uncovered under the law, and stay the heck away from the internet except to enforce the protection of children from predators, but in a way that doesn't involve nonsensical dns hijinks- just track them down and jail them or remove their sex organs.

As a general supporter of Obama, I still don't understand him being awarded that prize...

As I have stated on numerous previous occasions: no, the DMCA is not at the heart of unlocking (assuming it is relevant at all, an argument I have also made); we don't even have an unlock right now for the iPhone that involves bypassing the software restrictions (near as I can tell, third-party unlocks you get right now "fell off the truck" in AT&T's customer support division), nor have we for years; to a customer base that wants to unlock their phones, making it legal for third-parties to do it is a crapshoot, while everyone (from the White House now to those originally involved in the first DMCA exemption) think the FCC could have any interest in just hanging the laws regarding carriers locking them in the first place (and this petition from the White House seems to nail it, requiring the carrier to do the unlock even if you are still under contract: from my reading it largely argues that locking shouldn't even exist).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202461 (one of my previous public comments)

Hey White House, can I have my privacy back? I'll settle for a locked cell phone if I can call friends without it being reported back to you.

Yeah, I have to wonder if their renewed interest in this is a PR move to distract from more serious tech issues.

Because you can't care about one tech issue without marching in intellectual lockstep with the nerderatti on all tech issues.

There is nothing in politics that isn't a PR move.

For what it's worth, as someone who does not unlock, I see this as potentially negative. Why? Because the so-called "Unlocking Technology Act", among other initiatives, has been using the clout of the unlocking issue to promote essentially a wholesale repeal of the DMCA anticircumvention, citing its interference with exploit-based software unlocks as a core justification. This recommendation would require carriers to provide unlocks themselves rather than making hackers do it, which would be much better for unlockers, but obviate the need for circumvention. Yet all the other other use cases harmed by anticircumvention would remain, many of which affect me personally (and probably many HN users), but which might not gather as broad public understanding and support as unlocking currently does.

The anticircumvention requirement is one of the worst parts of the DMCA. If that was repealed as a result of this, I'd be thrilled.

Can you elaborate on how this eviscerates anticircumvention?

What my comment says is that this (the NTIA recommendation that is the subject of the article) might obviate part of the impetus for a pre-existing initiative (http://fixthedmca.org/unlocking-technology-act.html) that would essentially repeal anticircumvention, and thus could be a bad thing.

Edit: If you want to know what the Unlocking Technology Act would do, see http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th/house-bill/1892/text, it's pretty short.

Oh, sorry, I thought this was the Unlocking Technology Act. All clear now, and agreed, it would make more sense to let that go than merely the proposed unlocking exception.

That seems to be the same POV that the Librarian took in not renewing the exemption (link from elsewhere in thread): http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc-suggests-congress-create-a-b...

It's pure political framing.

If the DMCA can be construed as preventing unlocking, then you can build a political coalition to repeal that part of the DMCA.

If cell phones are not locked then there is no political motive and when you go on TV as someone who is against that portion of the DMCA you're framed as a Blu-ray thief. If you can reframe it around cellphone unlocking then you're a hero.

Cellphones are viewed as a very personal device and long term contracts / locked phones are viewed as a restriction on freedom. If you can make it about freedom then you can get Americans on board.

Requiring hackers relegates it to niche market and means most of the consumer benefits are lost.

I can't help but think if there's another catch. I know phone number portability probably helps them track us better.

Obama's consistent meta-policy has been: push the smallest change that will pass. If he figures he can get unlocking without having to fight Disney, he'll do it.

1) Do you really, honestly think repeat of DMCA anticircumvention is going to happen? I find this highly, highly, highly unlikely.

2) Because of #1: Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. This is a good interim solution.

I argue that the issue is that now the "anti-DMCA" crowd and issue that had been built up looks "satisfied" when Congress comes to look at that issue, as there is a more effective solution at hand to what had been placed at the core of their debate. It isn't that comex is saying "damn, rather wouldn't have this FCC rule, as the rule itself might be negative" but more "damn, the end result of this entire fiasco might be negative".

FWIW, I had been trying to get the FixTheDMCA people in the backend (my name is on their site) to realize this would happen since before they even started (as you maybe also know, but you might not have seen my numerous rants on IRC as maybe you weren't online at the time or were on other channels).

I no longer think "hey! awesome the government is trying to help us out" anymore when I read articles like this. I only think "I wonder what sort of benefits the government and associated business get because of this."

Funny... i'm also thinking "What is he about to try to ream us from behind with now, that he's trying to make us look the other way for".

Yeah.. I admit, I voted for him in 2008..

>Yeah.. I admit, I voted for him on 2008..

As did I. Last year, I just didn't vote.

I went for Jill Stein. After hearing nothing of substance in the Romney/Obama debates, the third party debates were a breath of fresh air. How I wish they had electoral clout, or that we had a system which encouraged voting one's preference.

You think the other presidential choice would have been better?

You really only have a choice between two identical assholes. There's no point in voting unless America drastically changes its voting system to something more democratic.

I would say voting for the lesser of two evils, while not exactly my idea of a thriving democratic process, is still worthwhile. Imagine McCain had been elected. How many of our soldiers would have been killed due to his desire to swing America's big dick around in front of the world? How many foreign civilians? Obama's far from perfect, and his Nobel Peace Prize is a joke, but he's kept the body count relatively low compared to any hypothetical Republican commander-in-chief.

> You really only have a choice between two identical assholes. There's no point in voting unless America drastically changes its voting system to something more democratic.

Some people insist that the entire point of democracy is to restrain power. In that sense, voting for the lesser of two evils is a perfect representation of democracy: you're voting for which set of restraints to put on, not what kind of future you want.

I've definitely heard that argument before. I always conclude with the person that our definitions of democracy are not similar.

Have you ever tried explicitly defining democracy as part of your conversation? I find it usually helps. Or at least makes them very quiet as they realize they have no idea what they're talking about beyond parroting something they heard once that sounded good as a teenager.

The government itself created the problem, and now they're being "helpful" by appearing to care about solving it?

>Some argue that making it legal to unlock cellphones could make it too easy for consumers to take copyrighted software between carriers

Eh, like what exactly? AT&T's crappy map software?

Yeah great point. They are worried about the crap we wish didn't even come on the phones to begin with.

So true, eventually I could see a suit being filed that removing some crappy software is creating a derivative work.

Is that like buying a newspaper at one coffee shop and reading it at another?

Sounds dangerous.

The consumer side of me likes this...the libertarian side of me laments it. Why not just go ahead and force Gilette to make their razor's handles fit Schick blades, or have Macs come pre-installed with Windows too, etc? Maybe not 100% perfect analogies, but you get the drift. It's hard to root for the carriers but I dont see how phone locking is entirely unreasonable, and I struggle to see how it's worthy of legislation that outright bans it.

It's a little bit different, though, because the government is already enforcing spectrum controls. It's not like you can go out and start your own wireless network on in Verizon's band - the government won't allow it.

Except that spectrum has been deemed a public good. The phones that utilize that spectrum are not.

USA carrier's phone locking is part and parcel of a completely deformed and deceptive marketplace where a people think the new iPhone "costs" $199 and most people decide between a Tmobile phone vs a Sprint phone vs a Verizon phone. I would have expected even a libertarian to see how out of whack the locked phone dominated US marketplace is compared to much freer markets in pretty much the rest of the world.

What is deceptive about the sales process with respect to subsidies? It seems pretty straightforward to me, and anyone who cares enough to ask can find out the details in a matter of seconds.

Hmm... ok. Walk into your local Verizon store, pick up any random phone being offered on contract and ask the following questions:

1) How much of this phone's price is being subsidized?

2) What percentage of my monthly bill is going towards payment on the device subsidy and thus:

3) how many months of service will it take to pay off the phone.

Actually I'd also welcome any online sources for such information for a such information from Verizon or AT&T (the holders of vast majority of mobile phone contracts in the US)

Personally, a bigger deal for me would be if they required the carriers to go to move to a "pay to send" for text messages. I hate it that someone else can force me to incur a charge for unwanted text messages.

US carriers are the only ones that do this. Such a shame.

As someone who is not involved in the industry, it seems weird that this issue hasn't been resolved by the market yet. The only major downside I can see to an individual carrier offering a pay to send plan is that unless they can get other carriers on board, they risk loosing when they interface with the other networks. However, they already have to deal with carriers in other countries (where from reading comments here, it sounds like do use a pay to send model).

The could start by introducing pay-to-send within their own network. If it gets traction, other carriers may follow suit.

Which carrier does this? I literally cannot think of one, even down to the bare-minimum $15/mo plans from, say, Virgin Mobile. It strikes me as one of those situations that screams "You're being scammed." Is this some flyover local carrier that I'm not aware of (I hear it complained about all the time), or is it some archaic and masochistic plan that people bend themselves over backward to whip themselves with?

Or is it simply that those are the plans that don't offer text messaging? In which case, situations like spamming black pages at remote fax machines come to mind. And all the legal ramifications involved.

Yes, you are being scammed, and all US carriers charge for incoming text messages.

AT&T: $0.20 per SMS or $0.30 per MMS, both ways. or text plan for unlimited messages for an additional $20/month

http://www.att.com/esupport/article.jsp?sid=52588&cv=820#fbi...

Verizon: $0.20 per SMS or $0.25 per MMS, both ways. or text plans an additional $5-$20/month, no unlimited option.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/planMessagingOverla...

Sprint: $0.20 per SMS or $0.25 per MMS, both ways. or text plans an additional $5-$20/month, with $20/month being unlimited.

http://www.sprint.com/landings/attachables/

T-Mobile: $0.20 per SMS or MMS, both ways. I think all current plans have unlimited text though, not sure.

http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-2825

I remember getting unlimited texting for $5 a month from Verizon circa 2005, and it was $0.10 per text without the plan. Why are phone plans just getting worse...

Here's Consumer Reports complaining about this in 2008:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/aboutus/mission/viewpoint...

I was completely unaware of the legal issues surrounding cell phone network unlocking. I remember that, in the past, all you had to do was ask your cell carrier to unlock your device and they would comply.

That the present legislation has been enacted shows how some of the people involved in enacting this travesty are as clueless as I am.

http://www.eweek.com/mobile/fcc-suggests-congress-create-a-b...

http://www.ibtimes.com/phone-unlocking-more-popular-ever-bec...

Yeah, it was weird that the Copyright Office declined to renew the exemption for phone unlocking. Yes, Congress created the problem with the DMCA, but they did specifically set up the Librarian with the power to fix oversights like this. (And I do personally think it was at least initially an oversight and not intentional.)

They did renew the exemption, but they limited it to only apply to devices purchased before January 2013. Their mandate is to only provide exemptions for cases that really really need it, and their reasoning for limiting the exemption was that carriers had relaxed their policies for officially unlocking phones (such as AT&T starting to unlock out-of-contract phones).

Here's the statement that the Copyright Office published: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2012/2012-26308_PI.pdf - the unlocking exemption is discussed on pages 16-20.

Am I the only one that is glad to read this news?

I think people are glad, sure. It's just that their highly skeptical of anything the government does anymore. With good reason.

It's just that they're... (god, that's embarrassing)

Instead of requiring carriers to unlock devices, he could just announce that the DOJ would fail to prosecute anyone who does choose to do it. It's possible to right a wrong without asserting additional executive powers.

The illegality of it stops approximately nobody as it stands, so this would do approximately nothing. The problem is not that it's illegal to do an end-run around the carriers, but that it's technically very difficult. Their locking mechanisms are constantly improving. For example, I'm not aware of any recent iOS release or iPhone version that has been unlocked without somehow involving the carriers or Apple.

There are SIM interposer devices ("a thin microprocessor that sits between your network SIM card and the base-band hardware") that can unlock an iPhone 4S on iOS 6: http://www.applenberry.com/gevey-ultra-s-gsm/ - that's the latest that I know of. I have no idea whether the DMCA applies to them though.

Oh yeah, I was aware of those but hadn't kept up with them and forgot to check on that when posting my comment. Nice that they've kept up with OS releases, although they seem to still be a bit hit-and-miss as to whether they support a given OS release and iPhone model.

Even if it was never prosecuted, carriers can make it a royal pain in the ass to use devices not sold by them by refusing to activate them, make their devices not even accept SIM cards for the devices, never sell SIM cards and only let preregistered IMEIs from devices sold by them to use their network. That was the Telus & Bell Mobility CDMA carriers back when I was in Canada, and it probably can still be like that.

That's Verizon and Sprint. The phones are mutually compatible but are unusable on the other network because they refuse to activate phones they didn't sell.

This is one of the nice things about GSM (as opposed to CDMA, which Verizon/Sprint use). GSM carriers can't block you from transferring SIM cards from one phone to another.

It's for this reason that people had iPhones on T-Mobile long before the iPhone was officially available on T-Mobile.

Well, they could stop you if they really wanted; they could IMEI sniff. AT&T does it to detect "smartphones" so they can helpfully add 'mandatory services' to your plan without your consent - it'd be easy for T-Mobile to block Apple's IMEI ranges from registering on the network regardless of whether your SIM worked or not.

The FCC should have implemented some actual common carrier regulations/a Carterfone-equivalent for the mobile industry. Instead, they're so mired in regulatory capture we get nothing.

Selective enforcement of laws is trouble in the long term. It transfers power from the legislature to the executive, and tends to yield situations in which everyone is guilty of something.

it already happens. Drug laws, etc. I'm sorry, but you have your causality backwards. Official (or unofficial) selective enforcement of the laws is a symptom of questionable laws, not a cause.

I disagree with respect to causality. If selective enforcement were not possible, then it couldn't happen. Imagine a (flawed, but fair) system in which, if an executive selectively failed to prosecute anyone for violating a law, then the law is nullified, just as (approximately) in the arena of trademark. An executive bound to enforce the law would result in more citizen/legislative/lobbying effort directed toward implementing better laws and fixing those that were broken or out of date.

In practice, executive (and judicial (and in general!)) discretion is important. As an example, mandatory minimum sentencing has attracted criticism. An adaptive front-line response is a good thing, but only to a point. Leaving vague or unenforced laws on the books has the potential for both abuse and compassion (see national monuments and the Antiquities act, for a non-judicial example).

>An executive bound to enforce the law would result in more citizen/legislative/lobbying effort directed toward implementing better laws and fixing those that were broken or out of date.

Or, the executive could choose not to enforce those laws (and screw people's lives over in the process) and take the initiative to scrub them from the books by introducing bills, etc. But you're right. Politicians are not usually decent people, and it's unreasonable to expect them to not play politics with people's lives.

"Selective enforcement of laws is trouble in the long term."

Also inevitable and unavoidable. Has been this way since the beginning of time (or whenever the first law was enacted).

>Some argue that making it legal to unlock cellphones could make it too easy for consumers to take copyrighted software between carriers.

My carrier does not have code on my phone, and my carrier does not need code on my phone.

Locked bloatware it's code for them and they need it to increase their profit margin, that's the ugly part of this story :(

how does bloatware exactly increase the profit margin?

For those of us without smartphones, they increase the profit margin by tricking users into buying things. All of the software on my gophone is trial only, and it is extremely easy to extend the trial by accident. Why on earth would anyone want to spend $3.99 to have an extra 10 days to 'evaluate' the shitty software on the phone? And WHY would this purchase be recurring?

And no, you can't remove the trials.

What about repealing the whole DMCA 1201? It's not FCC's job to fix crooked laws. There is a Congress for this.

You can already buy unlocked cell phones on Amazon and elsewhere, if you pay the full price of the phone. For example, Amazon sells an unlocked iPhone 5 (16GB) for $665.55. If a carrier gives you hundreds of dollars of subsidies for a phone, they should only be required to unlock it after your contract has terminated.

The subsidy is recovered over the term of the contract. What does carrier unlocking has to do with it? Even if I unlock my subsidized phone outside of official methods, I still have to fulfill my end of the contract.

The carrier might not be able to charge a large enough early-termination fee on the contract to fully reimburse them for the cost of an expensive phone.

Then they should charge an ETF that will allow them to recoup their costs and not trump up some imaginary "copyright violation" boogeyman that stops me from using my phone as I see fit.

This is equivalent to the administration encouraging McDonalds to give free refills on french fries. A silly, economically populist ploy intended to make the administration seem to be on the side of consumers.

I'm fine with that as long as they are required to unlock it after the the "rental" period.

I think they'll need to work on their definition and enforcement actions if this is to become a reality.

Verizon are already supposed to unlock their LTE devices in exchange for the use of their LTE bands, but many Verizon LTE devices are crippled in software when unlocked (with the notable exception of iPhones where Apple control the software).

As an example, the Verizon HTC 8X does not allow the user to alter the MMS gateway or roaming options and Verizon Samsung Galaxy phones used to need to be rooted to change the APN for data.

Sadly the mobile phone market is enough of a cabal at this point that more and more specific regulation might be the only way to make competitive consumer-friendly measures like this work.

Why not just define that the phone must allow the user to change provider settings that might otherwise be specific to one carrier?

Well, that's the end of $1 phones. The carriers will raise handset prices.

More correctly, they cannot ammortize the price of the phone indefinately anymore.

$1 phones are cheap upfront but you pay far more in the long run via lockin.

I think it's hard to say. Depends on the phone, the plan, and so on. Not a lot of transparency in the process -- An unlocked iPhone is $650, or $27/month over the life of the contract. That would likely make up a big portion of the monthly bill, were it to be broken out separately in the statement.

Why? If you're in contract, you still have to pay for your plan during the entire contract. Even if you switch networks, they are still making enough money to recoup their subsidy cost. Effectively it just becomes a loan (with truly awful rates).

How does this make it easier for the NSA to track US Citizens down? I mean would meta-data or meta-data collection be any different if the phones were locked?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com