Comment by QuiEgo
2 hours ago
> That's fundamentally incompatible with my worldview and I explicitly think it should be legislated out of existence.
The model that makes sense to me personally is that private companies should be legislated to be absolutely clear about what they are selling you. If a company wants to make a locked down device, that should be their right. If you don't want to buy it, that's your absolute right too.
As a consumer, you should be given the information you need to make the choices that are aligned with your values.
If a company says "I'm selling you a device you can root", and people buy the device because it has that advertised, they should be on the hook to uphold that promise. The nasty thing on this thread is the potential rug pull by Oneplus, especially as they have kind of marketed themselves as the alternative to companies that lock their devices down.
I don't entirely agree but neither would I be dead set against such an arrangement. Consider that (for example) while private banks are free not to do business with you at least in civilized countries there is a government associated bank that will always do business with anyone. Mobile devices occupy a similar space; there would always need to be a vendor offering user controllable devices. And we would also need legal protections against app authors given that (for example) banking apps are currently picking and choosing which device configurations they will run on.
I think it would be far simpler and more effective to outlaw vendor controlled devices. Note that wouldn't prevent the existence of some sort of opt-in key escrow service where users voluntarily turn over control of the root of trust to a third party (possibly the vendor themselves).
You can already basically do this on Google Pixel devices today. Flash a custom ROM, relock the bootloader, and disable bootloader unlocking in settings. Control of the device is then held by whoever controls the keys at the root of the flashed ROM with the caveat that if you can log in to the phone you can re-enable bootloader unlocking.