I find this great. The ability to differentiate on "free" phones was a barrier to competition on the service costs that allowed telecoms to avoid competitive pricing for decades.
My concern with the Spanish law is that it seems to ensure a functional, repairable phone physically but there is not a realistic way to ensure essential security updates across all the software involved.
In the end what changes if how transparent they are with pricing, before it was 60$/month with a brand new phone and 55$ if you brought your own device, now it's. 55$/month and you can bundle a phone for 5$ more.
This is in Quebec.
It's not a 'subsidy'. It's just a payment plan. Why get your loan from your phone company? I don't get why people wanted this in the first place.
Why is that a bad thing?
When carriers subsidize phones the price is inevitably higher overall. It's little different to those $1100 now or "$100 per month for 12 months" ads.
It's never happened before or since.
They wanted to sell at < £X without the appearance of having sold a premium product so cheaply. Bundling with the flight hid the cost.
It's possible this happens occasionally for phones but I doubt it's common.
A similar thing happened in Canada. A few years ago, a law was passed that barred 3-year phone contracts (with a new max of 2 years). In retaliation, nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped. Ie, there’s no such thing as “$0 phone on 3 year term” in Canada anymore.