Back in the heyday of the Bell system, telephones were owned by the phone company and you leased them as part of your phone service. That’s why they were made o

Back in the heyday of the Bell system, telephones were owned by the phone company and you leased them as part of your phone service. That’s why they were made of indestructible steel and you could hang up by slamming the handset down on the receiver at full force if you were really ticked off at a telemarketer or something. That also meant phone phreaks tampering with their own phones were in dubious legal territory because they didn’t own the phones. I think people should have the freedom to consent to buy whatever products they like so long as the functionality of the product is not kept secret. They also should (and do) have the freedom to try and jailbreak it but not to the point of obligating the manufacturer to produce an open system. But even if there is some sort of law that you can’t sell closed-stack systems, you could just migrate everything to equipment leases. IMO this would make matters much, much worse for the consumer in terms of having control over their own equipment (though maybe some equipment would be made to last again).