zlacker

It is nonsense, yet a similar thing happened recently with texting

Before Twilio et al, if you wanted to text a lot of your customers automatically, you had to pay thousands of dollars in setup and recurrent fees to rent a shortcode number

But then, with Twilio et al, you don’t need a shortcode anymore

The telcos told the regulators this would create endless spam, so they would regulate it themselves, and created a consortium to “end spam”

Now you are forced to get a license from them, pay a monthly fee, get audited, and they still let pretty much all the spam through, while they also randomly block a certain % of your messages, even if you are fully compliant

>>nico+(OP)
they can't even stop robocalls.

>>nico+(OP)
This is the direct result of the merger of Sprint and T-mobile. They swore up and down to congress they would NOT raise prices on consumers[0]. So instead they turned around and like gangsters would do said to every business in the US sending text messages: "It'd be a real shame if those texts reminders you wanted to send stopped working... Good thing you can instead pay us $40 / month to be sure those messages are delivered."

At the same time At&T and Verizon saying oh snap let's make money on this too and still being pissed about Stir Shaken so to get ahead of it for Texting before Congress forces it on them. This way they can make money on it before it's forced.

[0] https://fortune.com/2019/02/04/t-mobiles-john-legere-promise...