“I should not have to connect a piece of hardware to the Internet, even once, to use all of its features.”
Thomas Fitzsimmons paid full price for a Pixel 7 Pro sold as “unlocked” on store.google.com. OEM unlocking stayed greyed out until the phone phoned home to afwprovisioning-pa.googleapis.com. On that first connection the phone pulled down 383 MiB from storage.googleapis.com alone, all encrypted with keys the owner never sees. No carrier was involved. Google sold him an unlocked phone that needed Google’s permission to unlock.