u/downundarob

I know this is probably going to get buried under “spam prevention” arguments, but 10DLC has become one of the biggest, anti-compettive rorts to happen to small business communications in years.

The original pitch sounded reasonable enough: reduce spam, make messaging more trustworthy, register businesses, etc. But in practice? It feels like a giant paywall and compliance maze that mainly benefits carriers and the companies selling “compliance services.”

A few things that really bother me about it:

• Huge barriers for small businesses and startups. If you’re a solo operator or tiny business, you need to navigate brand registration, campaign approvals, vetting scores, use-case declarations, throughput limits, random rejections, and ongoing fees just to send legitimate texts customers actually asked for.
• Constant uncertainty. Even when you do everything “correctly,” messages still randomly get filtered or blocked. Support responses are vague, and carriers rarely explain anything properly. You can spend days troubleshooting a problem only to discover a carrier silently changed enforcement rules again.
• Anti-competitive by design. Large enterprises can absorb compliance costs and dedicate staff to managing this nonsense. Small providers and independent VoIP operators get crushed under administration and registration overhead. It creates consolidation pressure where only the big players can realistically operate at scale.
• It punishes legitimate use more than actual spam. Scammers adapt instantly. They rotate numbers, domains, SIMs, or move offshore. Meanwhile legitimate businesses with real opt-ins get throttled because somebody forgot a checkbox in a campaign form.
• The fees never end. Registration fees. Vetting fees. Campaign fees. Per-message surcharges. “Trust” ecosystem fees. Third-party platform fees. Everyone gets a cut now just for the privilege of sending a text message.

And honestly, the most frustrating part is that SMS used to be one of the last relatively open communication channels. Now it feels like email all over again: gatekeepers everywhere, opaque filtering, and compliance bureaucracy piled on top of already expensive telecom services.

What bothers me most is the precedent this sets.

We’ve quietly accepted a system where a small number of carriers, aggregators, and compliance vendors effectively decide who can reliably communicate at scale, under what conditions, and at what cost.

That should concern people far beyond telecom nerds.

Because at some point we have to ask: who should hold the switch to a nation’s voice?

Right now the answer seems to be: whichever corporations can afford the compliance department.

I’m not defending spam. Nobody wants robocall-tier garbage flooding phones. But the current system feels massively over-engineered and tilted toward incumbents.

Curious whether other people in telecom/VoIP/MSP land are seeing the same thing or if I’m just becoming old and bitter.

I threw together a video and posted it here https://youtu.be/pEdcVMyJMUY