Now, this is speculation on my part, but... I think if Apple went out of business the service that's causing this problem wouldn't even function anymore, becau

Now, this is speculation on my part, but... I think if Apple went out of business the service that's causing this problem wouldn't even function anymore, because I believe it relies on the MBP phoning home during the setup process and being informed that it belongs to the Expedia MDM group. This would then be why fixing it requires a call to Apple, rather than being something you can do simply by wiping settings on the device itself. (However, I don't know whether this means that booting it in a Faraday cage, or just with the internet disabled, after wiping device settings would allow bypassing it.)