6 ms·

The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However

by taf2 3y ago

The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However it has fees and effectively was like this: Hey smb, we see you send notifications to your customers . It’s be a real shame if those messages stopped delivering to your customer . Good thing you can pay us a brand registration fee just $50 and oh for each type of message a recurring $10 fee. It wasn’t a price hike to consumers directly but really was mob style shake down.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Yeah. Twilio's process was entirely focused on "campaigns", too, whereas we sent exclusively transactional ones. Very confusing, and we wound up removing our texting features entirely from our app.
- taf2 3y ago
  It wasn’t twilio it’s driven by the monopoly organization- the campaign registry.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The registration requiremenet may not be Twilio's doing, but there not being any significant guidance on what transactional senders should do for their particular set of processes is.
- JustARandomGuy 3y ago
  Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign. I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    I also use SMS for transactional SMS, and my understanding from their docs was also they don't, from this page: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-is-P2P-and-A2P-messaging- https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-... > All Twilio messaging is considered A2P in the US and Canada.
mritun 3y ago
Good riddance. Businesses have zero reasons for sending me unsolicited texts - and any messages thread not initiated by the user is unsolicited.
- jaywalk 3y ago
  What if the user "initiates the thread" by taking an explicit action on a website? The carrier has no way of knowing that, so what should they do? Just block everything? Not workable.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Yeah, gotta consider multi-modal interactions... and also there's no good way to pre-validate ownership of a phone number. So suppose Carol clicks "Contact Me Immediately Please" on a website and and enters her phone number... But--oops--there's a typo. Now Alice is going to get an "unsolicited" message even though literally everybody involved is operating in good faith. Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP".
    - foobarian 3y ago
      I would settle for stronger sender authentication. Of course SS7 and all that...
    - saltminer 3y ago
      > Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP". I sometimes wonder how many people use the STOP function. I'm more inclined to ignore it (if it's a one-off) or use the spam reporting feature than I am to reply "STOP" if I don't recognize the sender/campaign because of how jaded I've gotten from email. If you hit the "unsubscribe" link on a spam email, you only get more spam because you just confirmed the inbox is a) active, b) monitored, and c) is checked by someone willing to open and interact with spam messages. By the time SMS spam became common, I just assumed things would play out the same, and have probably reported plenty of legitimate mistypes to Verizon as spam. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the risk to directly respond.
nico 3y ago
They ramped up blocking text messages for months before introducing a2p 10dlc They certainly haven’t gotten rid of spam messages, but they still block a lot of fully compliant text messages Unfortunately, they could probably keep raising prices and companies would have no choice but to pay up That’s because the wireless companies banded together and formed a cartel
- nradov 3y ago
  The nature of the market makes it impossible to not have a cartel. The previous situation with a bunch of regional cellular providers building their own towers and establishing a patchwork of roaming agreements was clearly untenable due to customer demands for nationwide service and the enormous capital expense to build a 5G network.
pwg 3y ago
> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. I am fully in favor of businesses incurring "massive fees and restrictions" for sending text messages. The negligible cost of sending an email, resulting in the email SPAM problem, has indicated that doing otherwise will result in a massive flood of unwanted text messages for everyone.
- starik36 3y ago
  The problem is that they used a wide brush and made it next to impossible to have a hobby project that uses text messaging. My projects send maybe 3-4 text messages a week - to me - to notify me of stuff. Before you just pay $20 to Twilio and that's enough to send messages for years. Now you have to create a fake "business" entry with them, pay them monthly, etc... It's not a lot of money, but I just don't want to deal with yet another monthly bill. I basically switched to using my employer's Twilio account for personal stuff. They don't mind with my volume.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  The legislation [1] is already enough to deal with email SPAM and by extension SMS. The problem is that phone & email companies conveniently have no way of knowing who sent the spam so you can't go after them. It's an authentication problem not a cost problem. [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
  - waveBidder 3y ago
    there's more than one way to skin a potato. one can view the charge as internalizing the externality of taking soneone's attention.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However it has fees This is The Campaign Registry. Every inch of it is a confusing mess. It mandates setup and subscription fees. Last I checked, registration usually took 4-10 days but can be much longer. The way the regulation reads, every business that uses A2P 10DLC (software-sent text) needs to be registered and pay recurring fees. The purported intent is to determine which mass mailed texts are allowed. In theory, all others would be flagged or blackholed. The way the regulation is written however, it captures every software-sent text. This includes situations like a tech support session where a technician texts a diagram to a customer. The regs don't differentiate between this and actual mass mailing.
thesis 3y ago
The really cool part about this is The Campaign Registry who manages 10dlc registrations... is now owned by Tata Communications. A company based in India.

by taf2 3y ago

ceejayoz 3y ago

Yeah. Twilio's process was entirely focused on "campaigns", too, whereas we sent exclusively transactional ones. Very confusing, and we wound up removing our texting features entirely from our app.

taf2 3y ago
It wasn’t twilio it’s driven by the monopoly organization- the campaign registry.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The registration requiremenet may not be Twilio's doing, but there not being any significant guidance on what transactional senders should do for their particular set of processes is.
JustARandomGuy 3y ago
Glad to see someone else had that problem too - I spent hours reading through the Twilio documentation to try to figure out if transactional sms was allowed because all I kept seeing was campaign registration, campaign fees, and etc all about campaign sms. And if we had to pay the campaign monthly fees even if we sent transactional sms, not campaign. I understand that it's not Twilio's fault, but they desperately need to hire some developer evangelists to write some documentation.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  I also use SMS for transactional SMS, and my understanding from their docs was also they don't, from this page: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-is-P2P-and-A2P-messaging- https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-... > All Twilio messaging is considered A2P in the US and Canada.

mritun 3y ago

Good riddance. Businesses have zero reasons for sending me unsolicited texts - and any messages thread not initiated by the user is unsolicited.

jaywalk 3y ago
What if the user "initiates the thread" by taking an explicit action on a website? The carrier has no way of knowing that, so what should they do? Just block everything? Not workable.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Yeah, gotta consider multi-modal interactions... and also there's no good way to pre-validate ownership of a phone number. So suppose Carol clicks "Contact Me Immediately Please" on a website and and enters her phone number... But--oops--there's a typo. Now Alice is going to get an "unsolicited" message even though literally everybody involved is operating in good faith. Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP".
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I would settle for stronger sender authentication. Of course SS7 and all that...
  - saltminer 3y ago
    > Even if someone is maliciously pretending to be Alice, neither the website nor the phone-carrier has a better malice-detecting tool than simply sending it and seeing if the recipient replies "STOP". I sometimes wonder how many people use the STOP function. I'm more inclined to ignore it (if it's a one-off) or use the spam reporting feature than I am to reply "STOP" if I don't recognize the sender/campaign because of how jaded I've gotten from email. If you hit the "unsubscribe" link on a spam email, you only get more spam because you just confirmed the inbox is a) active, b) monitored, and c) is checked by someone willing to open and interact with spam messages. By the time SMS spam became common, I just assumed things would play out the same, and have probably reported plenty of legitimate mistypes to Verizon as spam. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the risk to directly respond.

nico 3y ago

They ramped up blocking text messages for months before introducing a2p 10dlc They certainly haven’t gotten rid of spam messages, but they still block a lot of fully compliant text messages Unfortunately, they could probably keep raising prices and companies would have no choice but to pay up That’s because the wireless companies banded together and formed a cartel

nradov 3y ago
The nature of the market makes it impossible to not have a cartel. The previous situation with a bunch of regional cellular providers building their own towers and establishing a patchwork of roaming agreements was clearly untenable due to customer demands for nationwide service and the enormous capital expense to build a 5G network.

pwg 3y ago

> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. I am fully in favor of businesses incurring "massive fees and restrictions" for sending text messages. The negligible cost of sending an email, resulting in the email SPAM problem, has indicated that doing otherwise will result in a massive flood of unwanted text messages for everyone.

starik36 3y ago
The problem is that they used a wide brush and made it next to impossible to have a hobby project that uses text messaging. My projects send maybe 3-4 text messages a week - to me - to notify me of stuff. Before you just pay $20 to Twilio and that's enough to send messages for years. Now you have to create a fake "business" entry with them, pay them monthly, etc... It's not a lot of money, but I just don't want to deal with yet another monthly bill. I basically switched to using my employer's Twilio account for personal stuff. They don't mind with my volume.
lesuorac 3y ago
The legislation [1] is already enough to deal with email SPAM and by extension SMS. The problem is that phone & email companies conveniently have no way of knowing who sent the spam so you can't go after them. It's an authentication problem not a cost problem. [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
- waveBidder 3y ago
  there's more than one way to skin a potato. one can view the charge as internalizing the externality of taking soneone's attention.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

> The main thing in mind that it did do is cause massive fees and restrictions for businesses to send text messages. The idea is this is to reduce spam. However it has fees This is The Campaign Registry. Every inch of it is a confusing mess. It mandates setup and subscription fees. Last I checked, registration usually took 4-10 days but can be much longer. The way the regulation reads, every business that uses A2P 10DLC (software-sent text) needs to be registered and pay recurring fees. The purported intent is to determine which mass mailed texts are allowed. In theory, all others would be flagged or blackholed. The way the regulation is written however, it captures every software-sent text. This includes situations like a tech support session where a technician texts a diagram to a customer. The regs don't differentiate between this and actual mass mailing.

thesis 3y ago

The really cool part about this is The Campaign Registry who manages 10dlc registrations... is now owned by Tata Communications. A company based in India.