ESIM is one of those everything old is new again things. Back in the CDMA days phones didn’t have removable SIMs. Instead all phones had preprogrammed modules for subscriber identification and were always tied to the operator. Then with 3G and later we got SIMs. Now with ESIM we are back to where we started (sort of) but this time we see ESIMs not as a sign of operator control but as a potential sign of weakness