Phone Unlocking Ban Cooks Up White House Petition

Just this past Saturday, it officially became illegal for anyone to unlock a smartphone without the carriers' consent. Obviously, this fired up a lot of people, who argue that if they buy an unsubsidized phone without a contract, they should be able to do what they want with it. And now, it looks like there's a White House petition going around that seeks for the unbanning of phone unlocking.

27-year-old app developer Sina Khanifar decided to take a stand, and created a petition that asks the White House to reverse the ruling and create legislation that makes carrier-unlocking legal again. The petition is already over a third of the way there, with more than 35,000 signatures. However, per the White House's changes, it needs 100,000 signatures before it goes through.

It took under a week for the petition reach over a third of its goal, but it needs to reach the 100,000 mark by February 23 before it can be passed over to the Obama administration for consideration. While many White House petitions in the past were a bit farfetched and, frankly, kind of ridiculous, this is one petition that is worth your signature.

Hopefully the petition will reach its goal, and if it gets passed along to the Obama administration, we'd like to be optimistic and say that there's a good chance that the administration will highly consider overturning the new law, but we'll ultimately have to wait and see until next month when the petition ends.

[via PC World]