[Google Pixel 2 Questions & Answers] cb474:
But a lot of times with these companies (in fact most of the time) you don't know the terms of the deal. It's buried in fine print that nobody understands, which is done intentionally to take advantage of people. Or they simply change the terms of the deal after you first got your plan, which is totally unethical; but you're stuck, because the cartel of four carriers all do the same thing and you have no real options.

The last point is really what you did not reply to in my post and the point that all of your arguments miss. We do not have real competition in the wireless industry in the U.S., because there are too few carriers so they don't have to really compete. Instead they effectively act like a cartel (i.e. monopoly), all offering more or less the same terms, and you have no choices.

In the U.S. this is in fact illegal. We have anti-trust laws. These companies should be regulated into real competition (instead of proposing mergers--like T-Mobile and Sprint right now, creating even less competition). But in the U.S. there has been no serious anti-trust enforcement since the 1970s. I have heard many a lawyer who used to work for the U.S. Justice Dept say that everything going on in these industries would have been considered anti-trust and blocked back decades ago, without question. But now these huge corporations have captured the government regulatory bodies and prevent them from doing their intended job.

What are you supposed to do when you have entire industries that are operating in a patently illegal and coercive manner, but the bodies that are supposed to regulate them and enforce these laws have been coopted by those industries (hello Ajit Pai, former Verizon lawyer, who now heads the FCC--or Makan Delrahim, head of anti-trust at the Justice Department who used to be a lobbiest)?

So if you have a system that is totally corrupt, in which the bodies that are supposed to stop the corruption have themselves be taken over by the interests they regulate, in which you are offered "deals" you effectively cannot refuse (unless you want to turn yourself into a non-functional adult in the modern world--which would be the case these days without a cell phone), then it is reasonable to resist the corruption. All of your superficially legalistic arguments miss the larger poltical/juridical reality of corruption in which we all live.

And in fact, this is why you don't have these kind of issues in Europe so much. In Europe they have real regulations on the cell phone industry, which allow for real competition, people get better deals and they don't have to worry about things like entitlement checks so much. People in the U.S. just live in such a weird bubble where we think we're the best at everything, have the best business climate, the most free, blah blah, that we often have little idea how corrupted we are compared to other developed democracies in the world.

So, with all due respect, the true legal/political reality in the U.S. just does not fit into the black and white overly simplistic (and somewhat naive) arguments you have provided.

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Also, as a smaller point, do we even know that blocking the entitlement check is a violation of the terms of the deal--has anyone really read all the fine print to that point? Whatever the case, it is absolutely inaccurate to call doing so "stealing" as you do (a favorite misuse of terms, usually of the intellectual "property" industry). Stealing is a criminal act. Violating the terms of your cell phone contract is simply violating a contract, the consequence which is that the other party no longer has to uphold the contract. At most they could have a civil claim and sue you for the lost revenue they claim they should have gotten for a tethering plan--but good luck to carriers who start suing their own customers over petty things like that. People really need to stop using criminal terms for things that are entirely contract and civil issues--and people need to understand the difference, both on a legal, moral/ethical, and political level, because "stealing" is not at all the same things on any level as violating a contract (the latter of which businesses do all the time and it's just considered good business).

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That aside, your argument that XDA is at risk is unfounded, I think. We still have freedom of speech. People can talk about these things all they want. If your argument had any merit XDA would have been shut down years ago. There was a time when the cell phone industry pursued legal battles to prevent people from rooting and unlocking their phones (especially Apple). No one shut down sites where jailbreaking was discussed. Lots of people use adblockers (on cell phones and browsers), which undermines the business mode of companies like Google. No one is shutting down sites that talk about this. People are free to talk about how to modify their phones. If a company wants to accuse a specific individual of violating the terms of their cell phone deal and cancel the deal they can. But no one is shutting down sites like XDA or even wants. to.