I work for a telecom. 99% of the time this was because the cost of the phone is built into your plan. There was a serious risk (and still is) of fraud whereby the phone is fraudulently ordered to an address, the phone physically swiped, the customer never pays, and the telecom can’t recover the phone or its costs. More basically, it used to be pretty hard to get money from customers who just stopped paying. You could get a €2000 euro phone for €500, pay that up front, and walk to the local guy with a serial cable who unlocked your phone for €20. Theres a lot more protections, technological and legal, that have slowed this now, but the profit is still high enough that jumping through hoops like embedding an ally in the contact centre or intercepting couriers is still worth it.

You could get a €2000 euro phone for €500, pay that up front, and walk to the local guy with a serial cable who unlocked your phone for €20. A world in which telecoms can’t use SIM locking to offer financing on ultra-expensive phones to people who would otherwise be bad credit risks sounds like an improvement to me. Most people would be better off financially if they didn’t buy a 2000€ phone.

Cool, you live in that world already. Most networks don’t lock phones anymore. Our first question to people who ask for phones to be unlocked is whether they actually tried the new SIM in it yet, as almost none of our phones are sold locked anymore.