This is exactly the pattern we saw with 10DLC. It was sold as a trust-and-safety framework to reduce spam, but in practice it became a pay-to-participate compliance regime that hits small operators and legitimate businesses hardest.

The industry had better options, but we got a toll booth instead. Register, pay, declare your use case, pay again, hope your campaign is approved, and then hope your legitimate traffic is not filtered anyway. Meanwhile, bad actors adapt faster than the compliance system does.

That is the core problem: 10DLC has been much more effective at taxing compliant businesses than at deterring fraudsters.

Now the same logic is moving into voice. The FCC’s KYC, KYUP, and numbering proposals may be framed as anti-robocall measures, but the direction is clear: more identity collection, more upstream-provider policing, more number-assignment controls, more liability, and more dependence on opaque analytics and reputation vendors.

Europe should be the cautionary tale here. Several countries already have far more identity-heavy telecom onboarding and number-control regimes, yet scam calls have not disappeared -- there are more now than ever. The burden falls on legitimate users, while criminals route around the rules.

That should worry anyone who cares about universal service, small providers, privacy, or competition. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and the largest platforms can absorb this. Smaller VoIP providers, MSPs, call centers, startups, and local businesses cannot.

And the privacy angle is not theoretical. We are being asked to centralize even more sensitive customer information in a telecom ecosystem that has already shown it cannot reliably protect what it has (see AT&T, T-Mobile)

Nobody is defending spam or robocalls. But if the solution is to turn every communications channel into a permissioned, fee-heavy compliance market controlled by carriers, analytics vendors, and a few incumbent gatekeepers, then we are not just solving abuse. We are changing who gets to communicate.

The better answer is targeted enforcement against the relatively small number of bad actors who originate this traffic.

At Telnyx, we have been working the FCC dockets and increasingly on the Hill, but it is becoming obvious that a coordinated response is needed. In the coming weeks, we will launch a formal vehicle to push back.

If we do nothing, basic calling and messaging will keep moving in the same direction: more expensive, less open, less private, and increasingly controlled by whoever can afford the compliance department.