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Comment by johndhi | Hacker News Reader

The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.

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Good. The fact that the FCC refuses to act (and GOP in Congress blockades things like chair nominations (read up on what happened to Gigi Sohn) to ensure inaction) against telcos just allowing spammers to ruin our national communications infrastructure because the pennies they get from them are worth more than all their consumers is an embarrassment to our country.

Some of these requirements aren’t even from Twilio but from upstream, Tier 1 telcos.

T-Mobile for example has made many changes over the past few years intentionally designed to make it harder to onboard large numbers of texts, and they’re happy to tell intermediaries like Twilio to get fucked if they don’t play ball.

Which in absence of any stronger measures is great, but those stronger measures could at least serve to create a baseline that’s the same and reliable across the industry. If you want to launch a 10DLC-based campaign it can be a real headache.

For Gigi Sohn: https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-gigi-sohn-is-back-sen...

> She’s shown unapologetic animus to conservative views, calling Fox News “dangerous to our democracy,” accusing Republicans of suppressing the vote, and describing Justice Brett Kavanaugh as an “angry white man.” She’s also supported progressive attacks on law enforcement, which prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to oppose her nomination.

> During her Dec. 2021 confirmation hearing, she committed to acting with transparency and integrity. But then she stonewalled the Senate’s request for a copy of a legal settlement she signed with broadcasters and the defunct app Locast, whose board she sat on. Locast was sued for capturing and retransmitting broadcasters’ signals over the internet without their permission.

> We were told that Ms. Sohn’s political statements made Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly uneasy.

It's not just the GOP blocking her.

The sometime political media convention that an action can't be described as a GOP responsibility if the 50 Republican senators are joined in it by 3 Democrats is purely obfuscatory if one is trying to actually understand what sides are involved in a political debate and what's entailed by empowering one party or another. Let's not adopt it here.

(Also, while maybe there's something to the Locast stuff-no idea-I'm not sure what a Democratic nominee is supposed to think about Fox News or Kavanaugh's temperament.)

(Article courtesy of WSJ owned by Rupert Murdoch who has a very large interest in keeping regulators out of the medias money printing machinery, out of ISPs rent-seeking grift, out of conglomerates which own both media companies and ISPs collusion against consumers)

Be doubly sure to read up on how the media AKA vested interest was weaponized against her nomination too.

Edit: here’s an article to get started https://www.theverge.com/23437518/biden-fcc-gigi-sohn-fox-ne... Note that it explicitly mentions Fox News (also Murdoch) so again I don’t have much faith that WSJ is unbiased about this issue. The Verge has some other in-depth articles about Gigi Sohn as well. Pretty ironic that the first response defending the GOP actions is from a source overseen by someone directly responsible for the media campaign against her. It obviously worked.

Moderates on both sides are adverse to appointing people to executive positions if they are nakedly partisan. These people are supposed to implement the policies written by Congress to their best ability. If the appointee is acting like a politician and not a civil servant, they should consider running for some political position.

Counterpoint: Ajit Pai

>> We were told that Ms. Sohn’s political statements made Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly uneasy.

> It's not just the GOP blocking her.

Is this supposed to be a real opinion? Manchin and Sinema are your cornerstones? LOL

It's not good to apply anti-spam paperwork against a service that never initiates a conversation.

This is extremely frustrating for me. We used to use Send In Blue. If you send a campaign, and some larger percentage (10% or so) do not open within 24 hours, they automatically suspend your campaign.

On the surface you might think this is a good idea, but we used this service for sending investor updates. Most of our investors don’t open non-urgent emails within 24 hours. SIB claimed it was some legal requirement.

We switched to Gmass, which sort of hacks your Gmail account to send campaigns. We haven’t had any issue with Gmass blocking our campaigns, so I have doubts SIB was being genuine about the legal requirements.

Based on what you're describing they probably were being genuine. The legal requirements are tricky and often enforced by private parties and only when actually enforceable. Gmail is supposed to be a private user rather than an application sender so you're probably skirting the requirements.

Did u try SES

maybe a "click here to continue receiving these updates" link at the end of the first message would have solved this. :o)

This wouldn’t solve the issue as it’s not retroactive as far as I know. Meaning this is the chain of events

- emails get sent

- some percentage of people do not open within 24 hours

- provider suspends the campaign

- receiver clicks a link like you suggested

- the campaign remains suspended and I can no longer email those contacts unless I delete, and re-add them

I continue to receive an overwhelming amount of scam text messages and calls. These messages do not seem to originate from Twilio (probably because its high cost deterring scammers and spammers).

So all these the legal requirements intended to curb spam and scams, are clearly ineffective.

Even my Twilio phone number wasn't immune to incoming spam, and Twilio itself couldn't block it. I had to create a studio workflow to combat the issue. Indeed, it's a puzzling world...

These requirements (not legal, they are by the telcos) are "soft" now and become "hard" this summer. There is a huge push for all campaigns and businesses using A2P SMS to be registered by July.

Pretty sure it's contractual obligations by the major carriers. Traffic registration is with the carriers, not with any regulatory body. So, it's out of Twilio's control but not "legal requirements".

Also its technically not required for actually inbound only, but it sounds like this application also sends ack replies.

This deplatforms a lot of legitimate transactional use cases and innovation. It's a horrible compromise.

I can't help but fear for what congress will do to neuter generative AI.

If it cuts down on spam to my phone, I am willing to let others pay for that cost.

I wonder if Amazon SNS SMS (terrible naming there!) has the same constraints, I assume not.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/channels-sms-origi...

The carrier terminology for this is "A2P 10DLC", and yes, absolutely everyone is involved.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-settings-regis...

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