When Apple introduced iPhone Handoff with iOS 27 this fall, it offered users something quietly radical: a single phone number living across two devices at once, dissolving the boundary between personal and professional life. But the carriers who underpin that connectivity — AT&T blocking the feature outright, T-Mobile placing it behind an additional fee — reminded the world that even the most elegant technology must pass through infrastructure built on older assumptions. The tension here is an ancient one: the innovator who imagines a seamless future, and the gatekeeper who controls the road t