FCC To Consider Making Text Messaging an Information Service, Denying Twilio Petition (fiercewireless.com) 92
The FCC has unveiled a new proposal as part of its plan to help reduce unwanted phone and text spam. From a report: In a move that's sure to make wireless operators happy, the FCC at its December meeting will consider a draft Declaratory Ruling on text messaging that would formally rule text messaging services are information services, not telecommunications services. That means carriers will be able to continue using robotext-blocking and anti-spoofing measures to protect consumers from unwanted text messages. Chairman Ajit Pai revealed the plan in a blog post highlighting items on the Dec. 12 meeting agenda.
"Today's wireless messaging providers apply filtering to prevent large volumes of unwanted messages from ever reaching your phone," Pai wrote. "However, there's been an effort underway to put these successful consumer protections at risk. In 2015, a mass-texting company named Twilio petitioned the FCC, arguing that wireless messaging should be classified as a 'telecommunications service.' This may not seem like a big deal, but such a classification would dramatically curb the ability of wireless providers to use robotext-blocking, anti-spoofing, and other anti-spam features."
That's why he's circulating a Declaratory Ruling that would instead classify wireless messaging as an "information service," denying Twilio's petition [PDF]. "Aside from being a more legally sound approach, this decision would keep the floodgates to a torrent of spam texts closed, remove regulatory uncertainty, and empower providers to continue finding innovative ways to protect consumers from unwanted text messages," Pai said.
"Today's wireless messaging providers apply filtering to prevent large volumes of unwanted messages from ever reaching your phone," Pai wrote. "However, there's been an effort underway to put these successful consumer protections at risk. In 2015, a mass-texting company named Twilio petitioned the FCC, arguing that wireless messaging should be classified as a 'telecommunications service.' This may not seem like a big deal, but such a classification would dramatically curb the ability of wireless providers to use robotext-blocking, anti-spoofing, and other anti-spam features."
That's why he's circulating a Declaratory Ruling that would instead classify wireless messaging as an "information service," denying Twilio's petition [PDF]. "Aside from being a more legally sound approach, this decision would keep the floodgates to a torrent of spam texts closed, remove regulatory uncertainty, and empower providers to continue finding innovative ways to protect consumers from unwanted text messages," Pai said.
Mixed feelings (Score:1)
I use Twillio to send important doctor appointment reminders, and I would hate to see them get blocked. On the other hand I know some people use services like them to send spam.
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I use Twillio to send important doctor appointment reminders,
Right there is the problem. Everyone who sends spam and junk texts and junk emails thinks their shit is so important that they should not be blocked from sending it. Every one of the spammers thinks that way. You NEED these ED meds! You NEED to speak to Russian women! You NEED our help to clean the viruses off your computer! You NEED a back brace! You NEED a third party to remind you about a doctor's appointment! Yada yada yada.
So the fact that YOU think that way speaks volumes.
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Texts being blocked (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an online service that sends me texts daily (weather forecasts and alerts), as well as a few other people. At some point my cell company started blocking those texts sent by my system. The others still received them (different cell carriers) but I did not, for a period of a few weeks. Then they started coming through again out of the blue.
No notification, no action on my part to indicate they were spam, no recourse to try and get my server whitelisted, etc. They just went in a black hole. I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
I'm sure the"robotext-blocking and anti-spoofing measures" help in the scheme of things, but this stuff needs to be standardized and centralized in some way.
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I have an online service that sends me texts daily (weather forecasts and alerts), as well as a few other people. At some point my cell company started blocking those texts sent by my system. The others still received them (different cell carriers) but I did not, for a period of a few weeks. Then they started coming through again out of the blue.
No notification, no action on my part to indicate they were spam, no recourse to try and get my server whitelisted, etc. They just went in a black hole. I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
I'm sure the"robotext-blocking and anti-spoofing measures" help in the scheme of things, but this stuff needs to be standardized and centralized in some way.
I don't agree with centralized... the federal do-not-call list is a giant fiasco. Consumers should be able to communicate with their provider (preferably also via an interface that can be automated) block whomever they want by phone number or IP address or email or whatever will actually work.
And telecoms should have the legal authority to block any known or suspected criminal communications with a due process appeals process in the courts.
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I don't agree with centralized... the federal do-not-call list is a giant fiasco.
It is a fiasco for two reasons. 1) there is little or no visible feedback that anything is done when someone complains of a violation. I complained many times about a harassing political campaign and have heard nothing back at all. 2) there is usually no information that can help the FTC find the violators. Spoofed caller ID prevents a large number of complaints, and prevents the FTC from finding anyone.
block whomever they want by phone number or IP address or email or whatever will actually work.
The same spoofed caller ID that prevents the FTC from doing anything also prevents this blocking. I.e., "
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Political Calls are "Protected Speech" under the USA Constitution.
As soon as the source is instructed to stop calling, they fall under the DNC.
i.e., Protected Speech.
Harassment has never been protected speech, and getting calls multiple times a day pleading with me to vote for X, from fake caller ID numbers with fake contact numbers in the message, are harassment. When the caller ID is valid, it requires just once telling the robocaller to remove your number from the list to put the "protected speech" into unprotected status.
This is actually Public Knowledge
Ahh, we've identified a political robocall shill, I see.
Re: Texts being blocked (Score:2)
GP is correct. You may not like the law but it's as described.
Stop being a douchebag and labeling people you don't like as 'shills' and 'bots', especially when it's just someone trying to set the record straight.
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Stop being a douchebag and labeling people you don't like as 'shills' and 'bots',
I've done that once, here, because the right of political parties to make harassing phone calls is NOT "protected speech", no matter how straight you think he's setting the record. Trying to claim that politicians get a special pass on harassment because it is Public Knowledge is, well, acting like a shill.
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If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. I also have a system that uses SMS text to send alert notifications to volunteer firefighters. If a carrier decides to block what I send, there is literally no point of contact to resolve the issue.
We send texts for our business and have had the same problem. We had like 500 clients call Verizon and complain. We finally got a point of contact back then to unblock us. That's about the only way. Other than using some short code service, which they don't block for spam.
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I have an online service that sends me texts daily (weather forecasts and alerts), as well as a few other people. At some point my cell company started blocking those texts sent by my system. The others still received them (different cell carriers) but I did not, for a period of a few weeks. Then they started coming through again out of the blue.
No notification, no action on my part to indicate they were spam, no recourse to try and get my server whitelisted, etc. They just went in a black hole. I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
I bet your carrier provides a portal for commercial senders to submit funds to get their postings cleared for transmission, though.
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I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
If you have a cell carrier that does not have a customer support telephone number, you need to get a better carrier.
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Emails as well especially used as SMSes (e.g., tmomail.net). Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't! :(
Consumer Human Shields (Score:2)
Wait (Score:5, Funny)
So Ajit Pai is good this week??
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wait (Score:4, Informative)
Not even slightly.
Everyone that thinks what he's doing is a good thing has fundamentally misunderstood the ramifications of redefining your text telecommunications from ... telecommunications, to an 'information service' with much weaker regulations and consumer protections. The whole "it's to stop t3h sp4mm3rz!" thing is a red herring, because there were already plenty of court rulings, etc. that allowed those narrowly-defined types of blocking on behalf of users. This is more likely a power/money grab on behalf of Verizon et al., who must have decided they weren't fucking consumers hard enough.
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Ajit Pai gets more money from the likes of AT&T than from the likes of Twilio, so he sided with the former. It's pure coincidence that that position happens to align with the interests of the public in this case.
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No, he's just proposing stripping more common-carrier regulations as an anti-spam solution. Which won't help either; the only difference is that now carriers will be able to take their cut of the spam. There's nothing in common carrier regulation that prohibits them from providing a service to users to block unwanted communications.
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making wireless operators happy (Score:1)
Re:making wireless operators happy (Score:5, Informative)
"...Chairman Pai’s action would give carriers unlimited freedom to censor any speech they consider ‘controversial,’ " This is from some guy that has a beef with FCC, but still seems to be a real concern.
Let me guess the timeline on this... (Score:2)
Twillo value now goes down.
Twillo bought out by a certain somebody.
This somebody is connected with another somebody.
Ruling goes away.
No, Text messages SHOULD be a Telecom service (Score:5, Insightful)
We should just get new rules for Telecom services that allow providers to implement agreeable blocking measures.
We rely on texts. My provider should not have unilateral authority to decide what text messages I do and don't receive,
assuming all the text messages are from an authentic (Non-Spoofed) source.
However, the FCC should also allow protections against SPOOFING and reasonable Denial of Service attack protections for Telecom services....
And as for blocking spam for telecom services: BOTH text message-based AND call-based robocalling and solicitation attempts ---
Providers SHOULD be encouraged and allowed to provide filtering, provided recipients have the option of controlling and/or opting out entirely of
content filtering services if so desired, And rate limits above a reasonable amount of traffic To/From a particular authentic sender/recipient should be allowed
with an Option of notification to the recipient when some messages are being suppressed.
For example: A system where someone can't send you more than a few text messages before you have replied.
Or better yet, a system where "unknown contacts" can only send you 1 or 2 messages per day unless you "Add" them to friends.
Also, someone who sends a text message to more than 3 unique recipients in an hour who never sent them a text and don't have them on their friends list will become rate limited to 1 text per 15 minutes.
Re:No, Text messages SHOULD be a Telecom service (Score:4, Insightful)
Or better yet, a system where "unknown contacts" can only send you 1 or 2 messages per day unless you "Add" them to friends.
I don't have a problem with your overall point, but this particular idea is problematic because it requires the cellular carrier to have continuous access to the list of contacts on your phone. I see no reason to give them access to that information.
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assuming all the text messages are from an authentic (Non-Spoofed) source.
Assuming there is no problem to solve, there is no problem to solve.
That's what assuming all text messages are from authentic, non-spoofed sources would mean.
How your cellular carrier determines if my email address is valid, authentic, and non-spoofed is a question left for the astute reader, because that would be required knowledge to make your assumption valid.
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How your cellular carrier determines if my email address is valid, authentic, and non-spoofed
SMS Text messages are from Wireless phone to Wireless phone.
The origin of a text message is always a phone number, not an E-mail address.
The carrier has only to make sure that the phone number they pass on as the origin of every text message matches the phone number that IMSI actually registered with the GSM/UMTS network.
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SMS Text messages are from Wireless phone to Wireless phone.
Some of them are. Some of them are not. The vast majority of the SMS messages I get are from an email source.
The origin of a text message is always a phone number, not an E-mail address.
This is patently false. Clearly you don't understand the system as a whole.
Now, you may claim that technically, there may be a short number (not a phone number) assigned to each message from an email source, but that number is carrier-generated and meaningless as far as validation of the source is concerned. For example, T-Mobile uses the range 3000-3999, I believe, to tag each SMS from email, which
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Some of them are. Some of them are not. The vast majority of the SMS messages I get are from an email source.
What you are describing is impossible. E-mail is an internet standard the transport is specified by RFC2821;
SMS text messages are part of GSM / UMTS ---- something transmitted over which is NOT e-mail - SMS has no concept
of Sending TO or FROM an e-mail address, because the telephone network is not part of the internet and does Not use internet addressing for
recipients and senders....
You m
Re: No, Text messages SHOULD be a Telecom service (Score:1)
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/... [makeuseof.com]
Every carrier has an SMS gateway. They could simply require you verify your phone number with their gateway before being able to use it and then that way they could use your real number in the SMS.
Color me surprised... SNAFU (Score:1)
Where's the opposition? Disasters everywhere and everyone's in a daze. The best we get is gridlock. Actual improvement is *off the table*. Pelosi will guarantee that [reuters.com]. Round and round we go! WEEE!
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Keep challenging your friends and family to explain the difference between the two parties
Nope, wouldn't be prudent... Everybody has to take their own initiative
The fundamental change to process that is needed is only going to happen on a long timeline.
Yes, an evolutionary one.
TXT is the new FAX (Score:2)
Did Ajit Pai just lay a golden egg?
AT&T has for decades maneuvered to change the Internet to ' metered rate' over ' access rate'. Here, the FCC singlehandedly transfers access to the providers AND assigns regulatory responsibility to monitor it, as well. That ain't gonna be cheap. TXT is the new FAX
Information Service? (Score:2)
This will allow ... (Score:2)
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Congress Needs to Settle This (Score:4, Insightful)
When the 1996 Telecommunications Act was being drafted, the intersection of the internet and personal communications devices was in its infancy. Browsers and hypertext pages that made the internet usable by ordinary people were only a few years old. Congress thought it understood the emerging marketplace and technology. It was wrong. There is nothing shocking about them being wrong about it. They gave the FCC a framework within which to make rules, but when the framework doesn't match the technology and marketplace there is no objective, technical, reconciliation that can happen. So the rules lurch with the winds of whatever the current administration is.
Congress should revisit the law, make the key political decisions and compromises, and pass a revised law. There was a failed effort to do it, but it is worth trying again. Otherwise we have an unending mess of the rules twisting in the political winds of whoever is president forever.
Good decision. (Score:2)
... this decision would keep the floodgates to a torrent of spam texts closed ...
Torrent is not a good way to distribute spam texts.
Both wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the carriers are currently doing and what the FCC is proposing are both wrong. Everything wireless companies do is a telecommunications service, not an information service, so that covers why the FCC is wrong.
What the carriers are doing now is also wrong: the intelligence should be at the edges. Now that all cell phones, including flip phones, are pocket computers, it's time to leverage those smarts. The wireless companies need to deliver everything (and charge a flat rate for access, none of this per minute/per text/per gigabyte bullshit)[1], and let the endpoints decide what they want to see. The wireless companies can maybe run the equivalent of the Adblock lists for spam text, and maybe enable them by default for handsets they sell, but I bet most people would opt for third party block lists. Cell phones should come with trivially easy interfaces to block unwanted texts and calls, out of the box. Maybe going so far as having a white list mode. It's long past time for the edges to be making the decisions, and the telecom providers getting their grubby mits out of our data.
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[1]If consumer flat rates can't pay for the network, charge the spammers more. They're business accounts anyway. Different rules.
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It's long past time for the edges to be making the decisions,
It is too easy for the vast number of input streams to overpower the "edges". Also, this requires the edges to be doing constant processing, consuming battery power, and will not work at all if the edge device is turned off or out of service area.
When email spam started to be a problem, lots of "edge" solutions started popping up. Procmail was just one. Eventually, however, the load on the core systems became so high that core filters were required. In other words, if the core data transport is so busy tra
Long Term win for Twillio (Score:2)
The number of Cell Phone companies is finite. Twillio just needs to use their first mover advantage to develop a whitelist/badd actors process with them. Then they will have the advantage of having their messages go through and their competition can go pound sand.
Twilio is not a "mass-texting company" (Score:2)
Twilio makes SaaS software that lets you interact with voice, video, and text via APIs. They make and power all kinds of stuff from chatbots to voice menus. I am sure some companies use their technology for nefarious reasons as well, but Twilio is not the one sending the messages, the company is.
Calling Twilio a "mass-texting company" is like calling Paderno a "stabbing device company".