SeasonFinale

I agree with your sentiment, but this is actually a terrible argument -- comparable to the silly anti-piracy "you wouldn't download a car" analogy.

See, when you buy a car and keep it in your garage, you can do whatever you want with it. But if you ever drive your car on public roads, there are TONS of regulations about what you can and can't do, including restrictions on:

• types of headlights allowed
• mufflers and noise restrictions
• emissions regulation
• types of gasoline allowed
• degree and location of window tint
• etc.

So if you buy a phone and keep it off the cellular networks, then it's like the car in your garage. But if you buy a phone and use it on a shared public network (public/private distinction not relevant here), then it's like a car you drive on roads, and you CAN'T just mod it however you want.

While most of the draconian DRM/DMCA measures may stem from copyright issues and antiquated media business models, it doesn't change the fact that when you "own" something that requires shared infrastructure to operate, you have to play by SOME rules or else it all goes to shit. Are the current rules fair and good? No. But at least be honest about the situation and your car analogy.

Look, I have no love lost for the carriers, cable, and phone providers, all of whom piggyback on decades of tax-payer subsidies to control their little monopolies with minimum expenditure and growth, maximum executive bonuses, and continuously transfer wealth to the upper class, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians who sustain this system.

But /u/iamaredditer made this argument:

If I can buy a car and make mods to it ... I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to mod a phone

My response was that this is a flawed analogy.

1. It begs the question of what degree of mods you actually are permitted to make to a car. In fact there are many limitations, as I mentioned above.

2. Furthermore, we already can legally mod our phones in many ways: wrap different cases around them, stick on jewels, attach peripherals that interface with our bodies and the world, customize look and feel, install a wide variety of software, etc.

You may believe that these phone mods are not really mods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman). But objectively each device can be changed and customized in some ways and not in others.

Now accepting this fact, how can you see the statement "If I can buy a car and make mods to it ... I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to mod a phone" as anything but a non-statement?

If you want to make a point about public/private (which I expected), consider that the radio spectrum is a public good. Do you suggest no regulation of wireless?

And circumventing carrier locks can obviously affect the network. Users might boost signal strength such that it affects other users, they might patch firmware to maintain multiple connections to multiple cell towers to maximize bandwidth, or any other number of things either well-intentioned or maliciously. All this causes reception and congestion issues, overall degradation of service, and potential software or even hardware failure of network nodes. But it is not on me to prove this, it is on you to prove that it can't.