Italian wireless carriers going after handset unlockers

Wireless carriers in Italy have started going after vendors who unlock cellphones (so they can be used with a competitor's SIM card) with a vengeance, with a recent sweep resulting in 30 people being charged with such crimes as unlawful access to informatic systems and transmisson of illegal codes. We can understand why carriers might get a little pissy about someone unlocking the handsets they subsidized, since it makes it easier for people to switch carriers and still use their old phone, but most of the time it's not locking the phones which tends to keep subscribers with their carriers anyway, it's the cancellation fees you have to pay when you try and wiggle out of a one or two year contract early. And even if it rubs them the wrong way, at the end of the day it shouldn't be against the law for customers to do whatever they hell they want with their phones. It's not like they're tweaking the phones to steal service or anything like that, they're simply trying to restore something to their phone that was removed from it when it was delivered to the carrier by the manufacturer.