Verizon, caught red-handed
There are a lot of pretty unpleasant things that Verizon are doing that one could make a compelling argument for being violations of the upper C-block agreement.  But, this really isn't one of them.For instance, selling phones with features stripped from them (bootloader unlock capabilities on HTC One, for instance), is really not brilliant, and may well be a violation of the intent of the terms, if not the letter.  The same might be the case for stripping tethering services from devices.  (They certainly did get nailed once for asking Google to block a tethering app on their behalf; I think they caved before the FCC intervened.  Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; the details on that one are hazy in my head.)But, there's nothing that says they have to sell you service (or sell you a SIM card).  If you have one, you can attach it... but there's nothing that says they have to give you one for that purpose.The "protection of the licensee's network" clause is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, by the way.  They can set up as onerous of a certification process as they (reasonably) want, and indeed, they have in the past -- the intent of the regulation is just that they have to apply it fairly.  The reason why these rules are there are that cell networks are incredibly fragile, and very sensitive to antenna calibration; especially on CDMA networks, the near-far problem[1] can be pretty lethal to service for everyone on the tower if just one device is miscalibrated.  It wouldn't at all surprise me if they had similar extensive calibration requirements for their LTE network, and they'd be well within their rights to do that sort of thing.I'm as much of an unhappy Verizon customer as the next fellow, but whining that you can't just go transmit on their frequencies with devices that they haven't tested is not really conducive to the cause of folks who would say that Verizon's upper C-block management is behaving in a fashion that limits customer freedom.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-far_problem