Move to 10-Digit Long Codes Remains Controversial, FCBA Told
AT&T and T-Mobile executives defended their work on policing 10-digit long codes (10DLC), during an FCBA webinar Tuesday. The codes allow businesses, charities and public interest groups to text customers or members using regular 10-digit phone numbers. Proposed carrier rules requiring high-volume text senders to register with a campaign registry, and to impose higher messaging fees on all that don’t file, or potentially block them, have been controversial (see 2109230068).
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Nonprofit groups view the rollout of 10DLC rules as “flawed from the start,” said Jamal Watkins, NAACP senior vice president-strategy and advancement. Carriers wrongly assume “that nongovernment organizations should be treated like corporations,” he said. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofits “had to pivot to a way to reach communities” through short-code messages requiring opt-in and peer-to-peer systems where people text their neighbors, he said.
The campaign registry system imposed by carriers “ends up being a corporate black box -- it’s a registration authority that somehow grades campaigns but in a way that is done by the private sector,” Watkins said. Community-based organizations end up with “low trust scores,” he said. There are also fees and fines, he said. NAACP is “big enough to where we can absorb any shocks,” he said: A lot of organizations can’t afford fines “if there are any particular missteps or hiccups due to not registering, etc.,” he said.
NAACP is working with AT&T but pulled all its T-Mobile numbers, Watkins said. “There are mom-and-pop organizations that don’t have that sophistication in order to do that bifurcation,” he said. NAACP understands why the carriers want to know who is sending messages to whom, he said. “But when it gets into giving a trust score and evaluating the credibility of an organization, we’re not sure that a private sector actor that has a black-box algorithm is set up to do that in the best of the general public, nor should they,” he said.
“This is an iterative process,” said Matt Nodine, AT&T assistant vice president-federal regulatory. “We have had lengthy and extensive conversations with NAACP, with state voices, and we’re trying to get this right. … We want our customers to receive the text messages that they want to receive.”
“We’ve had … what I would characterize as a really great back and forth as we kind of laid out where AT&T is and sort of the perspective we bring trying to protect consumers,” Nodine said. AT&T rolled out its 10DLC program March 1 and continues to make tweaks, he said. Short codes have been “a very effective means of communications for consumers,” but the move is to long codes, Nodine said. “That isn’t always the case” and some unwanted spam texts still go through. About half of emails are spam and a quarter of calls are robocalls, compared with 3%-4% of texts considered spam, he said.
Industry is taking some of the same best practices used for toll-free calling and short-codes and using them for 10DLC, Nodine said. “AT&T wants to ensure that our consumers receive the text messages that they want to receive” and to protect consumers from texts they don’t want, he said. The best approach is to “make sure that industry is policing itself,” he said: “These are not static situations. … We’re watching, we’re observing our network and we’re stepping in and we’re acting when we see bad actors attempting to flood the network.”
10DLC addresses “a gap in the system” with short codes, that companies like Uber or DoorDash wanted to be fixed, said Mark Methenitis, T-Mobile director-legal affairs. Drivers and delivery people needed to be able to call customers and not just text them, he said. Uber and the others found a back-door route to using personal messages, so they had phone numbers and the carriers didn’t want to shut that down, he said. “It has taken us years” to develop a tagging system “to make that functionality work,” he said.
Now 10DLC is treated the same as toll-free and short-code messages, Methenitis said. “It has to follow those same industry best practices with respect to things like having opt-in consent to be able to send messages to those consumers, honoring all opt-out requests automatically,” he said. Groups sending 10DLC text have to work with an aggregator with a connection to the carriers to be able to deliver a message, he said. Aggregators are “the critical piece of the chain and the message sender” that “really handles most of the monitoring, routing, all of those sort of things,” he said. T-Mobile works with only seven aggregators, he said.
Providers are free to use scoring as they choose, and T-Mobile doesn’t “rate limit political entities of any sort,” Methenitis said.