EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
Every single modem and cell phone I’ve ever owned have worked without a subscription to anything. My internet and ability to make cell calls were limited after my subscription ended, but the devices themselves were easily repurposed to other uses.
I too support the idea that devices should not be bound to a specific parent service. I do not support banning any device that requires one. Where we draw the line on functional/non-functional is arbitrary as long as the device has some function without a service. If they added a chip and antenna that let the Car Thing receive/play radio would that qualify it as functional? If not then how is a Modem still functional when the signals it is designed to receive are locked behind a service? It makes no sense to go down that legal and technical rabbit hole when you could simply legislate that devices be user configurable instead. There numerous industry standards that could function as the backbone of that law versus the useless feel-good sentiment of ‘ban everything I don’t like, even though I can’t rigorously define what that is’
How about a law that if the service is no longer provided then the company needs to provide a means to unlock the device?
That way companies can still have their subscription stuff, but once they inevitably stop supporting the product it doesn’t become useless.
I’d go a step further and say it should be capable of an industry standard communication protocol from the beginning and every device that has a ‘root’ or equivalent elevated access mode should be user recoverable (not easily necessarily, but there shouldn’t be any specific counter measures to prevent it). EOL unlocking would be a good first step towards that goal.
In my country nobody (or at least, most people don’t) buy their own routers, it’s always a subscription on top of the existing internet service