Earlier this year, when the librarian of Congress declared that unlocking a cellphone to make it available on other carriers was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, many people were outraged. A genuine grass-roots effort to change the policy sprung up and more than 114,000 people signed a White House petition to voice their discontent.

When the White House announced its support to allow consumers to unlock their cellphones, the administration noted that the policy was “crucial for protecting consumer choice, and important for ensuring we continue to have the vibrant, competitive wireless market that delivers innovative products and solid service to meet consumers’ needs.”

The Unlocking Technology Act (HR 1892), recently introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and co-sponsored by Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., would make it legal to circumvent digital rights management locks and to develop and sell cellphone unlocking software.

Despite the best of intentions, the very innovation that some members of Congress, the White House and presumably consumers who signed the petition claim they want to protect would actually be hampered by allowing consumers and third parties to unlock their cellphones. The DMCA is supposed to prevent digital piracy by making it illegal to disable digital rights management software, and it applies to the device locks that carriers put on cellphones — primarily to prevent phones they sell from being used on other carrier networks. When tech companies spend billions of dollars on research and development, they have to recoup those costs and make a profit to stay on the cutting edge of innovation.

One of the ways they do this is by entering exclusive agreements with certain wireless carriers. AT&T, for example, dominated the smartphone market for years because of its exclusive contract to distribute Apple’s iPhone in the United States. AT&T paid Apple an exceptionally high subsidy on top of the consumer purchase prices, but the company made quite a return on its investment. In subsidizing more expensive phones, AT&T could sell more expensive data plans to its customers.