With the recent iPhone 7 announcement, Apple confirmed what had already been widely speculated: that the new smartphone won’t have a traditional, analog headphone jack. Instead, the only ways to connect the phone to an external headset or speaker will be via Bluetooth or through Apple’s proprietary Lightning port.

Those tiny wireless earbuds aren’t the only thing that just became easier to lose. So did users’ freedoms.

The reasons for Apple abandoning the analog jack may be innocuous. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone’s body. It advertises that the move helps make the phone more water-resistant. And certainly, many people prefer a wireless listening experience. But intentionally or not, by removing the analog port, Apple is giving itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. It’s also opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.

When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device.

With the headphone jack gone, every other option is controlled by the iPhone’s software. With Bluetooth, the phone can distinguish between different types of devices and treat them differently. Apple can choose which manufacturers get to create Lightning-compatible audio devices. As our colleague Cory Doctorow pointed out, big content companies could take advantage of that control:

Once Apple gets the ability to add DRM, the record industry gets the ability to insist that Apple use it ("A phaser on the mantelpiece in Act One must go off by Act 3" - Pavel Chekov, Star Trek: TOS). In 2007, Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Music, in which he said, basically, that the record industry had forced Apple to put DRM in its ecosystem and he didn't like it. The record industry is still made up of the same companies, and they still love DRM. Right now, an insistence on DRM would simply invite the people who wanted to bypass it for legal reasons to use that 3.5mm headphone jack to get at it. Once that jack is gone, there's no legal way to get around the DRM.

In other words, if it’s impossible to connect a speaker or other audio device to an iPhone without Apple software governing it, then it’s simple for Apple to place restrictions on what devices or functions are allowed. Because US law protects DRM technologies, it may be illegal to circumvent that restriction, even if you’re doing it for completely lawful purposes. Having created the possibility of restricting audio output to select devices, Apple will be under pressure to use it. TV and film producers insist on having the power to decide which devices can receive video. Can we really believe they will leave audio alone if outputs become entirely digital?

Besides, with only Apple earbuds currently supporting the Lightning audio connection, the only way to connect an iPhone 7 to a recording or mixing device will be over the suboptimal Bluetooth connection or a dongle provided by Apple. Other developers must ask Apple for permission to create and sell Lightning-compatible devices. It's possible that iOS or specific apps will be able to disable the dongle. Any device that requires the 3.5 mm jack—your cherished audiophile headphones from the 80s; the converter you rely on to hear your phone on your hearing aids—just became less useful.

Will Apple take advantage of its newfound power to restrict your listening experience? It’s hard to say—and the company itself has been adamant that it won’t. But you shouldn’t have to depend on a manufacturer’s permission to use its hardware however you like. If Apple had kept the analog jack, then the iPhone would be less susceptible to content industries attempting to push the company to regulate product use. What you can do with your hardware should be determined by the limits of the technology itself, not its manufacturers’ policy decisions.

One more thing. This story isn’t about just Apple; it’s about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s protection for digital rights management (DRM) technologies. Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass DRM or give others the means of doing so. Until that changes, DRM lets technology manufacturers cast a cloud of legal uncertainty over common uses of their products. It’s a law that needs fixing.