In 2024, the GOP campaigned on cutting costly and burdensome regulations, noting that deregulation in President Trump’s first term saved American households $11,000 per family. The pledge was to slash regulations that stifle jobs, freedom and innovation, and that make everything more expensive, while restoring transparency and common sense to federal rulemaking.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has taken that mandate seriously. The FCC just ended a long-standing regulation that added needless complexity for mobile consumers while actively fueling theft, fraud and transnational device trafficking — with stolen phones flowing from the United States to criminal networks in Russia, China, Cuba and beyond.
Many regulations are fake. They don’t serve their stated purpose, but they sound good on the surface. In this case, the unlocking rule created real harm.
In 2007, the FCC imposed an extra, non-statutory condition on Verizon’s purchase of spectrum rights, requiring it — alone among carriers — to unlock devices just 60 days after activation, far earlier than standard industry practice. Phones that could be unlocked quickly became magnets for theft. Criminal networks quickly learned they could steal Verizon devices, wait out the short unlocking window, and resell them at a premium on the black market.
Even more outrageous, the so-called unlocking mandate was never necessary in the first place. The mandate originated with a Google lobbyist, cloaked in fashionable rhetoric of “openness,” but in reality designed to weaken property rights and shift leverage away from mobile network owners.
The FCC chairman at the time embraced the idea. Then in 2021, the FCC doubled down, extending the requirement as a condition of Verizon’s acquisition of TracFone. Fraud spiked 55% after TracFone shifted from a one-year lock to the 60-day policy.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide support ending this harmful rule. Federal and state investigations repeatedly showed that stolen devices were not isolated petty crimes but fed larger criminal enterprises, supporting drug trafficking, human smuggling and organized fraud schemes operating across borders.
No other major wireless provider was subject to this rule. Others operated in accordance with industry standards for fraud prevention and consumer protection. The regulatory asymmetry distorted competition and made Verizon’s devices uniquely attractive to criminals.
Carr’s action restores competitive neutrality by allowing Verizon to follow the Consumer Code for Wireless Service, the voluntary industry standard adopted in 2013 that governs unlocking transparency, timing and military protections. Consumers are not losing rights. Verizon is simply being allowed to follow the same rules as everyone else.
The rule of regulation, like that of medicine, is simple: first, do no harm. Washington ignored that principle for nearly two decades. The administration is now doing the work that should have been done years ago — cutting fake rules that failed consumers and empowered criminals.
Roslyn Layton is a broadband and regulatory economist/InsideSources
