> You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Exactly. And proper providers make legitimate users jump th

> You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Exactly. And proper providers make legitimate users jump through so many hoops. E.g. with Twilio I can't even send text messages to US long codes (regular numbers) anymore without assigning "campaigns" and giving sample text messages... All I wanted is that my users can pick a phone number and use SMS as an interface to send commands and queries. They (US government and Twilio) don't even let me do that in order to "fight spam". > I suspect that telcos don't want to do anything about abuse because it's a very large fraction of their total traffic. Same here. They keep adding process and restrictions on legitimate users to prove that they're working on it, but I don't think they really want to. Sure, there are probably fishy international service providers that house legitimate AND spam traffic and are hard to block. But phone networks are much more centralized than email and should have better abilities to fight spam if they really wanted to (but instead keep profiting from it)