"If the chips enforce this" -- at this point, you're talking about hardware that is only really usable in one country. Yes, the US market is large and important

"If the chips enforce this" -- at this point, you're talking about hardware that is only really usable in one country. Yes, the US market is large and important, but it's not the only one. This is why things are done in firmware, so the factory can configure particular runs of boards for legal sale in whatever country they're attempting to manufacture to sell in that day. Now, for the sake of it being cheaper, many devices may have just one big firmware blob: this is more common in devices like wifi routers than other things (e.g. cell phones). I am a researcher in RF-related technology: my personal views are that the radio firmware should be kept separate from the rest of the software running on the device (fairly similar to what many phones do with a separate baseband), with the ability to upgrade the radio bits being restricted to a) the manufacturer and b) users that the FCC has approved to make such modifications -- this would provide a sane way to certify groups who can make these changes, both for research purposes and for the OEMs that are integrating the RF capabilities into some larger consumer device. In addition, there's many times where we've purchased hardware and performed modifications in-house to the control software, specifically because we DO have a license from the FCC to do things outside of what would be allowed for normal consumers. Forcing special hardware runs for things that aren't locked down and can be used by the couple hundred groups (if that) in the country who do this sort of thing is going to be even more prohibitively expensive. Finally, I'm extremely aware of the thought processes that would lead manufacturers to lock everything down if they're forced to lock anything down, and this could be mostly worked around by making the manufacturer of the RF hardware (who typically isn't the company selling you a device) responsible for those protections. They won't have any desire or ability to touch the other parts of a device, so they won't really be technically able to lock them down in the best case scenario. This gives a lot of freedom for the higher-level software to be kept in a state where it's easy for users to modify.