I'm not making a judgement on it either way. These are things that are available to change in source. I'm just pointing it out, since others aren't aware of how things can be done.
But there are things locked out in the US I cannot get to. One of the things I've wanted to do for some years is turn on BeiDou reception, but it has a firmware geofence while inside CONUS. For Qualcomm devices there's no way that I've been able to find a way around this, it's not an opensource component. Just to preempt anyone saying it's because it's Chinese spywhere, Qualcomm/Tomtom engineers don't feel receive-only reception is a security risk (there's a report somewhere where military said the same, it's strictly a political prohibition): https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Staff%20Re...