Before Twilio et al, if you wanted to text a lot of your customers automatically, you had to pay thousands of dollars in setup and recurrent fees to rent a shortcode number

But then, with Twilio et al, you don’t need a shortcode anymore

The telcos told the regulators this would create endless spam, so they would regulate it themselves, and created a consortium to “end spam”

Now you are forced to get a license from them, pay a monthly fee, get audited, and they still let pretty much all the spam through, while they also randomly block a certain % of your messages, even if you are fully compliant