How to Solve Texting’s Spam Problem – Standardize KYC

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There are 7 billion textable cell phones deployed on 750 mobile networks. This ubiquity and diffused oversight makes SMS spam impossible to stop and unwieldy to moderate. There are too many intermediaries, senders, and networks for any one solution to completely solve the issue. But we can try.

Last time, I shared my views on spam prevention and how the FCC can help. Here we’ll discuss what it takes to meaningfully conquer spam. This is also different from the FCC’s recently published plan. 

Good spam prevention:

  1. standardizes Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations;
  2. upgrades the SMS user experience;
  3. easily identifies, enforces, and escalates violations.

Step 1: Standardize KYC

To stop spam, you have to identify spam. To identify spam, you have to know the sender. And to know the sender, you have to know your customer. 

Industry estimates are that around 3% of A2P messages are spam. Yet the A2P channel is the source of most unwanted messaging. It’s not that P2P channels aren’t spam-free, but they are easier to control and harder to scale. SIM farms, for example, can be triangulated and identified. Moreover, if you purchase two dozen SIM cards, you’re raising a red flag, which again can be identifed. 

Independent of SIM cards, email-to-text gateways and A2P have complicated spam containment. An A2P app can be anywhere on the internet. This combined with its ability to automate and scale the mundane make it easy to flood a network with unwanted messages. 

Unlike P2P, in A2P there is an unbuckling of identity between the sender and the receiver. Verification and vetting of the sender are left to the A2P application, and every application implements them differently, resulting in uneven KYC.

Therefore, to stop spam before it enters the network KYC requirements need to be standardized. These requirements should include, like the 10DLC system already does, a reputation score that’s earned by who you are and what you do when you get access to the network. There should be enough formal verification to verify systems and enough flexibility to vet humans. 

A sender’s reputation is a combination of who they are and what they do. Making KYC requirements universal will ensure not only uniform vetting but also a feedback loop where reputation is something you constantly earn. 

Next

We’ll go over both the SMS experience and how that can help improve the feedback loops.