A phone holds intellectual property and digital information, perhaps belonging to other people. It's complex.
The comparison is overly simplified, I think.
For example, as soon as you subscribe to corporate email, your device is considered "managed" and can be remote wiped. I was surprised not to see this in the article.
And a house can't? Not to belabor the obvious, but houses often contain phones, along with other storage media holding a wide range of digital information. The phone, like the house, is still your physical property, regardless of any information it may contain.
Saying that "the phone is still your property" is true physically, but that's not what the OP is saying. He's saying that whoever sold you the phone shouldn't be able to control or limit what happens to it. Why not though?
I wonder what he thinks about homeowner associations in the US. Or gun laws. Or zoning restrictions. Or all of the other laws that society has added since then.
My Samsung TV won't let me install apps from anywhere but the Samsung app store. Is that really breaking the Magna Carta? This is silly.
I can't speak for the OP but I would generally agree with this statement. Selling something implies turning over control to the new owner. If the device still answers to you after the transaction you haven't really finished your part of the sale. This is somewhat like the concept of inalienable rights, where e.g. you can't voluntarily transfer ownership of your body to someone else while you're still alive because regardless of what you claimed to agree to you still have effective control over it. Except in this case their control is alienable but they simply choose not to relinquish it. One can make a reasonable argument that claiming to sell a device while actually retaining control over it is a form of fraud—that this isn't a sale but only a lease. Imaging selling someone a house with unbreakable locked doors, and keeping the keys to those doors for yourself, so that the new "owner" must beg permission from you to enter. This make a mockery of what it means to own something.