Ask HN: What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby projects?

Re:Ask HN: What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby proj... by mdorazio on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:27AM (#36002401)

I use Twilio for a friends & family only project, and just this week jumped through the hoops to register. I'm willing to suck it up and pay the $2/month because I understand the purpose of this whole thing is to reduce spam. I hate the spam texts I get more than I hate paying $2 so for me it's worth it. However, I understand your reluctance and also considered (and might eventually switch to) something other than SMS, maybe back to good old emails or if I get everyone onto a single messaging platform I'd use an API into that.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby proj... by abound on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:37AM (#36002509)

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

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Re:Ask HN: What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby proj... by mdorazio on Friday May 19, 2023 @10:54AM (#36002686)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby proj... by abound on Friday May 19, 2023 @12:30PM (#36003796)

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.

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