I had a retail and wholesale business selling phones.
The unlocking will continue to be available and will occur no matter what this law says. It’s impossible to enforce because people can learn to unlock their phones via the web and dealer stores (non-corporate stores) will continue to do it in backrooms for $50 or $100 now that it is illegal.
Before this law, unlocking was prohibited in dealer contracts for dealers, but customers had no restrictions.
Go back to who this benefits: carriers not named AT&T.
99% of my customers who wanted a phone unlocked were those who wanted to unlock the iPhone to use on T-Mobile. AT&T is trying to prevent loss of subscribers.
Another aspect of this is the large scale sale of iPhones to the Chinese market by people/companies other than Apple and AT&T. I shipped at least some 50,000 unlocked iPhones to Hong Kong. There was no law or dealer agreement prohibiting my doing this. The iPhones were bought by legitimate customers of Apple or AT&T, sold to me legally because I paid a good price, then I sold them legally to the Hong Kong market at a markup of $135/unit.
How did you think iPhones got into the Asian markets?
Aha! So this is all your fault.
(Kidding. I’m totally kidding.)