Thanks To Trump, Verizon Immediately Starts Making It Harder To Switch Mobile Carriers

Last week we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.

Verizon, as we’ve long established, hates competition, and immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules. The pay-to-play Trump administration quickly agreed, and now Verizon has started telling wireless customers they have to wait a year before switching phones after purchasing one from Verizon:

“Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days due to restrictions imposed on its spectrum licenses and merger conditions that helped Verizon obtain approval of its purchase of TracFone. But an update applied today to the TracFone unlocking policy said new phones will be locked for at least a year and that each customer will have to request an unlock instead of getting it automatically.”

Again, these conditions were broadly popular and served the public interest, ensuring that it was easier for consumers to switch between our ever-consolidating, anti-competitive wireless phone giants. Verizon lobbied the FCC by repeatedly lying, without evidence, that these conditions resulted in a wave of black market phone thefts. FCC boss Brendan Carr, ever the industry lackey, parroted the claims in his rulings.

To be clear this is, for now, only something Verizon is doing via its prepaid sub-brands that include Straight Talk, Tracfone, Net10 Wireless, Clearway, Total Wireless, Simple Mobile, SafeLink Wireless, and Walmart Family Mobile. These brands often attract lower income customers who can least afford to be trapped under an expensive provider like this.

Verizon’s quite intentionally targeting these folks first, effectively making freedom and choice a luxury tier (much like telecom providers tried to do with privacy before U.S. government corruption discarded privacy oversight entirely).

You can, for now, still buy an unlocked phone from an independent retailer, bring it to Verizon’s main postpaid brands, and port it back out again if you’d like. But when Verizon sees limited Democrat and press backlash to this first push (guaranteed with so much else going on), it will steadily keep expanding its restrictions to include its primary brands and all unlocked phones.

I know this because I’ve covered this company for a quarter century and this company’s anti-competitive ambitions are as predictable as the tides.

Ideally, Verizon wants to return to what it considers the golden era of cellular phones: circa 2007 or so when carriers restricted how you could use your phone and restricted what apps you could install (remember all the shitty VCast Verizon apps they wouldn’t let you uninstall? Or the way they’d block phone GPS hardware from working on third-party apps?). Back then, they would also tether you to one carrier via expensive long-term contracts with costly early termination fees.

If we stay on this path of zero U.S. corporate oversight, it’s all coming back, sooner or later. From there, should U.S. governance remain under corrupt authoritarian dominance, it’s only a matter of time before Verizon tries to dictate what content you can see in collaboration with the kakistocracy, thanks to the Trump administration’s destruction of popular net neutrality protections.

This has always been Verizon’s ambition as a lumbering telecom giant that can’t innovate and hates competition and government oversight. Thanks to Trump’s assault on regulators, it’s increasingly difficult to hold companies like AT&T and Verizon accountable for literally anything (see the 5th Circuit’s decision to let AT&T off the hook for lying to, and spying on, its users).

And the Trump administration’s ongoing quest to rubber stamp every merger that comes across its desk means more consolidation, and ultimately higher prices for U.S. wireless consumers who already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world.

Verizon and other broadly despised telecoms have struck a generational blow against oversight and consumer protection across Trump’s two terms, and they intend to take full advantage of a presidency they helped purchase. All while the president informs his loyal rubes he’s a champion of affordability.