T-Mobile Leans On Recent Supreme Court Chevron Ruling To Insist The FCC Can’t Require All Phones Be Unlocked

Last July the FCC announced it was moving forward with plans that should make unlocking your mobile phone easier than ever. According to the FCC announcement, the agency, with broad and bipartisan public support, has been working on new rules requiring that wireless carriers unlock customers’ mobile phones within 60 days of activation.

Wireless carriers, trying to monopolize consumer hardware and lock everybody into hardware and software walled gardens, historically had a brutal and draconian view of device unlocking. If you recall, you not only used to not be able to switch wireless phones between carriers, but companies routinely forced you to use their own, substandard mapping or GPS apps.

At various times unlocking your phone was also deemed downright illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We’ve come a long way (with wireless carriers dragged kicking and screaming most of the way), and very often it’s now possible to unlock your device and change carriers if your phone is paid off and you’re no longer under contract.

But the FCC correctly observed that the current guidelines surrounding unlocking are a mishmash of voluntary industry standards and inconsistent requirements — usually affixed to merger conditions or the use of certain spectrum. The agency’s new proposed rules should create some uniformity, and will even require that devices be unlocked if a user is under a wireless contract.

Unsurprisingly, wireless giants like AT&T and T-Mobile aren’t enthused. Both have been filing whiney missives with the FCC, claiming that clear unlocking rules will somehow prevent them from providing incredible value to U.S. consumers. T-Mobile has been going so far as to claim the rules would stop them from being able to offer cellphones on payment plans (which makes no coherent sense).

T-Mobile, a pale echo of the disruptive “uncarrier” it used to be before the Sprint merger, even went so far as to hint that the FCC might not have the authority to do any of this in the wake of the Supreme Court’s dangerous and corrupt Chevron ruling:

“[T]he Commission fails to point to specific statutory authorization for an unlocking mandate, and would have profound economic consequences, thus raising a ‘major question’ that would require clear statutory authority from Congress,” T-Mobile vice president of government affairs Clint Odom told Democratic commissioner Geoffrey Starks last week.”

Should the FCC proceed, T-Mobile hints the FCC will face legal action. That’s quite a tone change from a company that used to be viewed as a disruptive, consumer-centric player in the wireless space.

As noted previously, corporations, well aware that they have a corrupt Congress in their back pocket, recently pushed the Supreme Court to dismantle what’s left of regulatory independence, throwing most consumer protection and regulatory autotomy into legal chaos. It’s framed by corporate power earlobe nibblers as some noble streamlining of rule-making authority, but it’s just rank corruption, designed to prevent regulators from being able to implement popular reforms.

In this case, you’ve got a really popular and fairly basic streamlining of rules preventing wireless companies from restricting consumer choice. And yet even here you have companies trying to claim that the FCC now, post Chevron, lacks the authority to do absolutely anything of note. Post Chevron, you’re going to see a lot of this, across every business sector that impacts every last aspect of your life. Popular reform efforts vetoed by a corporations and a corrupt court.

Some, like this, are going to be problematic annoyances impacting relatively minor reforms. Others, in instances like environmental or public safety reforms, will absolutely prove fatal. Yet it’s been hard to get journalists, the public, or even many policy folks to understand the full scope of what’s coming.