Maybe a way around this is for intermediary companies to own the phone that happens to have service and then lease the phone.

This is essentially already a reality in Australia. I had to email identity documents + a photo of my face holding an ID to two separate companies just to shift eSIMs to my new phone.

They have to have your residential address for "emergency reasons" which is fairly defensible at least

Anything about the 10 spam phone calls I get a day? no I didn't think so.

Something about no taxes without representation

I’m surprised it’s taken this long to go after this.

In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.

True for most EU countries since a while - at the premium Telcos shops.

Not true in most EU countries if you just go into one of those shady shops nearby train station and ask friendly, while the shop is empty, if he could sell you a SIM thats already verified.

It was only a matter of time.

The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.

Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.

This is one of those rules/laws that is worse than useless, without fixing the protocol shortcomings that make spoofing trivial the only people who will be affected by this rule are regular people.

Seems pointless to do this without also doing something about phone number spoofing.

I do not understand the outrage, law abiting users have nothing to fear (TM) and criminally minded users (or undocumented) can always pay a homeless person, a few bucks to register their burner.

This is standard in my country. Seemingly as a consequence, eSIMs require physically going to a store to be activated (on the telco side), which has always seemed insane to me.