Comment by chithanh

And that is totally fine, as long as people know what they are investing their time and money into.

I know that some years back, getting your mobile phone financed on two-year contracts was a normal thing. But it was a debt trap for consumers. Some EU countries noticed, and now carriers have to declare such contracts a consumer credit, and need to afford the same consumer protection to their customers as banks have for loans (in Netherlands for example registering with the BKR).

So carriers can still do that but they cannot pretend it's not a loan.