IPhone :: Officially Unlock USA While In Europe?

as many people on this board should know; in other countries, namely European ones, they have much more consumer friendly laws/practices regarding unlocking phones. in most of them they are required to unlock your iPhone for free after they recoup the subsidy or at the very least after your contract is up. the specific laws by country .when they do this they take your IMEI number from your specific iphone, contact apple in some way, and apple plugs your IMEI into the itunes servers, and the next time you plug your iphone into itunes while you have an internet connection it unlocks your iphone permanently forever (so long as your IMEI number stays on file i suppose).in America we have no laws regarding locking/unlocking phones, aside from the dmca amendment (clarification) from November 2006 that expires in three years that says Unlocking your phone yourself is legal (was it renewed?).

In practice in the usa every phone i cant think of either has an unlock code that you can input into the device at any time to unlock it, or the cell company will unlock it for you at the end of your contract or sometimes if you are traveling internationally. of course, the iPhone is the ONE PHONE that at&t refuses to unlock after the contract, unlike its other phones. when the iphone first came out they said they would but a day later their spokesperson had to publicly state he was wrong and that they would NOT unlock iphones under ANY circumstance and that has been the case ever since. even the phones you can buy without a contract are locked to at&t.***my question is this: in some countries you can pay and have your iphone unlocked at any time. if i take my American iphone to Europe can i pay to have my phone "officially" unlocked? will they refuse to do it unless i am on their European network? will apple reject my IMEI because they know its activated to USA at&t and purchased in America with an at&t contract? it seems like even the newest jailbreak and unlock (blackra1n, blacksn0w) are buggy, so i don’t want to do it. all i really care about is being able to use foreign sim cards and not getting but traped by having to use at&t's overpriced international plan. the international plan DOES NOT include data roaming (or does it not include data at all?), and your email updates automatically. i know you can turn off data roaming but there have been reports of the switch magically turning itself on. even if you accidently slide it on for a second and you switch it off if your iphone dls ONE MEGABYTE of data during that time it could cost 27 dollars!!!

also, this horrific nightmare scenario could happen. I’m not sure if at&t or apple or the gsm carrier in Bermuda fixed this, and i know all you have to do is explain what happened to at&t in the above case and they will zero out your bill but its still a monumental headache. also there have been hazy reports of this happening to other people in other countries. I am a big nerd and very tech savy and i LOVE cellphones, i previously had an enV with hacked free internet and free navigation. i consider the inability to "officially" unlock American iphones to be its biggest drawback, and a BIG one at that. after the contract they should have to offer you an unlock, not doing so creates tech waste. forcing people to get expensive international plans that don’t even include data, a basic function of the iphone, is VERY greedy of at&t.