Your quote is exactly the part that confused me. I'm not an android developer, so my perhaps naive reading of that segment meant to me that there are two possi

Your quote is exactly the part that confused me. I'm not an android developer, so my perhaps naive reading of that segment meant to me that there are two possibilities: 1. regardless of whether you install a custom boot rom, the lowest-level software running on the phone might be impossible to overwrite, so the carriers still have some basic low-level access to your phone to tell android to lock you out. 2. any such feature is part of the code that is itself replaced when you install a custom rom, so would be defeated and you'd be safe (at least as long as the model you buy does not turn out to have become locked down during the manufacturing batch you end up buying). It sounds like 1 is just not the case, thankfully.