flan [they/them]

before there was reddit there were message boards and these message boards tended to be pretty small and niche. They would have low thousands of users, if that. I don’t think having low user counts is something to be afraid of - especially for sites run and paid for by volunteers.

who cares?

It’s just to give more control to the carriers. They say it’s a feature for travel but realistically how many people and how many countries does that actually apply to? Some places require ID to buy a SIM card, many places don’t even offer plans travelers would want to use (who wants to pay $80 for 1 month of unlimited data instead of $5 for 1GB for a week?), and there’s also the question of how many travelers are there vs locals? Are the travelers the majority of users? The majority of profit? Why don’t the travelers’ local phone companies have travel plans to gouge the travelers themselves?

Anyway all this is to say this is just carrier lock in, it’s the return of CDMA.

The US is the hegemon of the West, they call the shots. It’s reasonable to talk about US in place of the west.