Go ahead AT&T and Apple, bring on your law suits against fed-up consumers who are trying to recapture their right to freedom of choice, and see what kind of reaction you get. Think the outcry over the purposely un-replaceable battery scam is growing loud, wait until every iPhone purchaser is fully fed-up with the poor service and exorbitant fees forced down their throats because of your anti-competitive collusion. I hope you have deep pockets. Very deep. At least when Apple was screwing consumers with their proprietary hardware, OS and licensing schemes, there were open architecture Windows-based PCs and freely available software not controlled by Apple as an alternative.

Attempts to unlock the iPhone would not have been necessary if Apple and AT&T had not acted in a monopolistic and anti-consumer manner in their collusion to eliminate service provider choice. Notice that in Europe, Apple is dancing with a lot more partners, partly because the EU doesn't play the monopoly game.

Cell phone manufacturers have gotten away with this sort of scam for a long time, locking purchasers' phones, their personal property, to a specific service provider. Locking the phone makes the phone useless if the consumer wishes to change providers, requiring them to buy another phone, and go through the hassle of transferring their data between the two devices. This is paramount to theft on the part of cellular service providers. The wired phone companies can't get away with this sort of scam, so why is this activity tolerated from wireless service providers?

What kind of outcry would there be heard if cars were locked into running only on specific networks of roads, for instance, so that their owners couldn't drive their cars to their houses, or get to their intended destinations?

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