carrier "subsidy"

Of course, that was why I used it as example. It is an example showing that in practise it is often impossible to lock down the device. Hence for any practical concerns whether you lock it down Tivo style or just make it inconvenient for the consumer to use it in unintended ways (like removing the tethering possibility from the system, requiring somebody to patch system internals to enable it again), can amount to the same end result for the vendor. They get their money, and they get fine grained control on what functionality the user has access to.

I have one very real life example of how ridiculous the Tivo stuff can be. As already mentioned HTC actually provides tools to unlock their devices, so you could say that those devices are not locked, but there is a level of inconvenience if you want to swap out the image it came with from the carrier. Now my daughter got a HTC Desire, and I wanted to flash a newer version of Android on it because HTC stopped providing newer versions of Android for it. I would say this is a prime example of what we are talking about here. I knew HTC provided tools, went over there downloaded the tools and started looking for documentation. I found the whole thing quite confusing, especially since it seemed geared towards windows users, and I only had linux. I ended up just deleting all of it, headed over to CyanogenMod and used their un-official tools to unlock the boot-loader, just as I did for my Tivotized Galaxy S2 earlier. You see, whether the device is Tivotized or not doesn't necessarily amount to much. Most funny part of the story? When I finally got the boot-loader unlocked, my daughter didn't want me to flash the device anyway. I usually follow the nerd slogan "if it works, fix it!", that may have something to do with it. I didn't even succeed in making my own daughter take advantage of the possibilities provided by an open device, simply because she did not trust anything but the official image from the carrier.

Moral of the story? Tivotization is plain stupid when it comes to consumers. I see no benefits for anybody. Even worse, as long as there is no software license pushing it away, I am afraid the madness will just continue for decades.