Thank you for an answer! I understand you correctly if I make such a summary - is it more likely that the government will disconnect me from the Internet or the manufacturer will disconnect me from their network than they will disconnect the device itself?

Why try to convince all those phone manufactures to give you control when you already have control over the phone network? It's like trying to get every car manufacturer to alter all their cars when you already control the roads.

> This would mean that the device is not under the customer's full control. If this was known to customers, they would not buy the device. If the manufacturer were to use this feature, the lawsuits would pile up overnight. We already have a situation where devices are not under customer's full control, namely tivoization and proprietary software. If I have an iphone but I want to run a modified IOS on it, then that's difficult at best and Apple actively tries to stop it. (1/2)

Roku devices demand that one log in to a data mining account to use wifi, and there's no way to remove that. Yet, iphones and rokus are very successful. There are many more examples, from IME to smart refrigerators. It seems that consumers do not care about control, or, at least, are easy to deceive. (2/2)

Phone manufactures have to put in many backdoors for the different nation states, both overt and covert. US - WEA, E911 China - Face scan when buying sim.

I'm not sure about iOS, but I know that Android users can definitely remote-lock and remote-erase their own devices here. It is presented as an anti-theft function, but in principle, I would tend to assume that Google would be technically capable of abusing it if they chose to do so. (Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I'm just going off of publicly-available information here. I have no reason to think that Google actually wants to do this.)

In the time of fully automated background over the air updates being done for a decade as normal operation in phones, and nowadays also in cars, I find "it would be very dangerous to hypothetically take control away from the user" rather … cute. We've had amazon delete legally bought ebooks from kindles, Google effs up customer access to customer data every other product migration, FTDI bricked clones of their devices through windows driver update, reMarkable pivots to a subscription model for a (checks notes) paper-notebook replacement device… this has happend A LOT of times.

John Deere, department-sized printer service subscription models, a lot of on-premise "Hardware as a Service" things that just sound as if you were renting the device to do whatever you want with it... the list goes on. Also, a lot of IoT devices, gaming devices, smartphone-based restaurant payment systems, … become non-functional without a steady connection to the server. Whether you turn off the device or the service might make a technical difference, but not one to the user.

There's a legal component, too: under some (most western?) jurisdictions, companies can even be forced to deactivate their own devices if they can if it comes to their attention they're being used in an embargoed nation.

I have several examples from my own life, the latest being O2 disabling the ISDN S0 bus on my father's NGN DSL modemrouter, as they have no fun offering it, even if they're contractually obligated, and even if it technically makes no difference to their core network – as far as I can tell, this was because they wanted to switch to a new router firmware that was company-branded (and probably that did not include ISDN functionality).

"But it has not happened. As soon as a manufacturer did it, no one would trust the manufacturer. So it is never in the manufacturer's best interest to do it." - Companies will find a way to sell it as a feature and most people won't know or care.

Sigh, if everyone could note the context of the question. It's about "turning it off". I have already mentioned cases where there was a loss of consumer control. There's no need to try to "prove me wrong" by merely adding more examples of what I have already provided.

Google has the capability to remotely delete apps from Android devices and has done so in the past. It may not qualify as "turning it off", but if you remove all apps from a phone, then it comes pretty close to just that. And it did not seem to have hurt Google or Android financially, challenging your assertion that users would run away from such features.

"I have already mentioned cases where there was a loss of consumer control." - If I interpreted your answer correctly, you're saying that in past cases where there was a lost of consumer control, people stopped buying from those companies so it is not in the companies' interest to control what people do with their devices. Companies like Apple show that this is not the case and exerting control over customer's devices can be a very successful strategy.

The original question was about remotely turning off a device, but your answer strongly implies that any attempt by a company to control what users do with their devices would not be a good idea. Also, one of the other answers pointed out that in at least one case a company has remotely disabled its devices using anti-theft features, which obviously counts as "turning it off." Companies certainly can have the ability to remotely shut down devices even if they're unlikely to use it in this case.

@schroeder "Sigh, if everyone could note the context of the question. It's about 'turning it off'." To a native speaker of English, "turning it off" means cutting power, but remember that the OP is a citizen of Russia and presumably not a native speaker of English. It seems very likely that he is asking about disabling a device in any manner, not merely about causing it to power down.

GM has been able to stop their cars for years.

Not exactly the same thing but Samsung responded very quickly when it was exposed for throttling apps. Trust is definitely broken when something like this surfaces.

@iconoclast how have I not accounted for that?

Sonos did it

"As soon as a manufacturer did it, no one would trust the manufacturer." - I don't think this logic holds for Russia specifically. Consider how access to things like Google Play, paypal, Visa/Mastercard, Spotify, Netflix etc. etc. have already been removed. These actions carry the same risk of destroying trust, but it didn't stop any of it from happening. I think we need to assume that normal considerations do not apply here.

My jaw is on the floor over this entire thread. Just wow. C'mon people. At what point did I ever say "and therefore it never, ever happens"? I said clearly that it could happen. I've said clearly that it has happened. All I said is that it's not something that a manufacturer would lightly add. And then that manufacturers don't need to add it for the scenario in the OP to come about. Sheesh. Unclench, people.

@schroeder Um, what does this mean, then? "But it has not happened. As soon as a manufacturer did it, no one would trust the manufacturer."

@8bittree it means that manufacturers of mobile devices have not built this into their products at this time. As many others have pointed out, some have added it, incidentally, to some products to keep them from exploding, but it is not a built-in process to allow a government to "flip the switch"

@schroeder From the question: "it is urgent to disable all updates on both desktop computers and mobile phones, saying that with the next update, all phones will turn into a pumpkin." So, as has been pointed out, and you have acknowledged, at least one manufacturer can and has issued an update to disable a device. Note that OP said nothing about governments.