3 ms·

That's a useful bit of perspective, I'd been cynically looking at this as a money grab by carriers, but if it does end up reducing spam, seems like a net positi

by abound 3y ago

That's a useful bit of perspective, I'd been cynically looking at this as a money grab by carriers, but if it does end up reducing spam, seems like a net positive. I think my main ideological qualm is that now I'm paying both for usage _and_ for the subscription. I also don't understand what the monthly fee is for in this case. Once the campaign is vetted + verified, what ongoing cost is there for them? Just feels like rent-seeking behavior by the carriers. At the end of the day, I might just bite the bullet, go through the process, and pay the fee though, I'm not super enthusiastic about any of the alternatives

mdorazio 3y ago
I could be wrong here, but I think it's to significantly increase the barrier to spam senders. Today it's dead simple and effectively free to register as many fake accounts as you want and send millions of spam messages. The new rules + fees make that both time prohibitive and cost prohibitive. The latter is important because spamming is a business model - if spammers can make more off their scams than it costs, they will find a way to do it.
- abound 3y ago
  That's heartening to hear, I'm a firm believer that the best way to eliminate these undesirable behaviors is to remove the financial incentive to do so. That said, as far as I can tell, this solution doesn't seem to get to what (in my completely layman understanding) is the heart of the problem, which is number spoofing. Even if every number is registered to an owner who has vetted their campaign with the carriers, if someone can "pretend" to be someone else's number, it seems to circumvent that whole system. Really stressing that I have absolutely no knowledge of telephony networking, I think of this like IP spoofing. If this new system don't include some authentication credentials attached to each campaign, it doesn't seem to ensure that the entity sending a message/call from a given phone number is indeed the "owner" of that phone number.

by abound 3y ago

mdorazio 3y ago

I could be wrong here, but I think it's to significantly increase the barrier to spam senders. Today it's dead simple and effectively free to register as many fake accounts as you want and send millions of spam messages. The new rules + fees make that both time prohibitive and cost prohibitive. The latter is important because spamming is a business model - if spammers can make more off their scams than it costs, they will find a way to do it.

abound 3y ago
That's heartening to hear, I'm a firm believer that the best way to eliminate these undesirable behaviors is to remove the financial incentive to do so. That said, as far as I can tell, this solution doesn't seem to get to what (in my completely layman understanding) is the heart of the problem, which is number spoofing. Even if every number is registered to an owner who has vetted their campaign with the carriers, if someone can "pretend" to be someone else's number, it seems to circumvent that whole system. Really stressing that I have absolutely no knowledge of telephony networking, I think of this like IP spoofing. If this new system don't include some authentication credentials attached to each campaign, it doesn't seem to ensure that the entity sending a message/call from a given phone number is indeed the "owner" of that phone number.