Verizon's banning of abortion discussion highlights home routing issues

A while ago I came across this post on Ars Technica, last September, about Verizon’s ‘flip-flop’ on censoring ‘unsavory’ political group text messaging.

A pro-choice abortion group wanted to setup a US shortcode to send opt-in updates to interested parties. Obviously each US network has to agree to the setting up of a shortcode and whilst the other networks were perfectly fine with this, ye olde Verizon refused. The objected to the group on the basis that Verizon policy prohibits distribution of “highly controversial” and “unsavory” messages.

24 hours later, after a consumer outcry, the policy was dumped and the group were allowed to setup their service.

I came back to the article when, after quite a few conversations with industry executives, I began to consider the possibilities of censorship and home routing. If you recall, I posted this viewpoint (“the arse with SMS home routing”) a few weeks ago. I had a ton of feedback from it. Generally speaking, almost everyone was universally against home routing (that is, allowing networks to control the delivery of text messages themselves — right now, the originating network is tasked with delivering a text message directly to the handset of the recipient). One person (he asked for his name to be withheld) pointed out that, in his opinion, there are one or two small network efficiencies that can be gained from home routing. I’m sure.

But consider for the moment, the potential of a great ugly mobile company deciding what it does with it’s text messages.

It’s nigh on impossible (unless you’re a Government with trillions to spend) to monitor the content of millions of voice calls each day. Impossible.

But it’s quite easy to monitor the content of text traffic, particularly when the traffic HAS (in the case of home routing) got to get through your network to deliver to your subscriber. To be clear, right now, most networks don’t operate home routing so they can’t and don’t monitor text messages as they arrive. They have inter-connected to allow other networks to terminate messages to their subscriber handsets. If you thought you were safe from home routing in the UK, you are… unless, that is, you’re an o2 customer.

If Verizon hadn’t actually stood up and made such a tit of itself last year, I don’t think I’d even be thinking this. I’d have pushed the thought out of my mind thinking, “silly, silly, nonsense, that’d never actually happen…” But…

I know the Verizon abortion debacle was about a shortcode but I can really see the day when, if more and more networks decided to adopt home routing, that, all of a sudden, there’d be a list of predetermined ‘banned’ words introduced, ostensibly for consumer safety and probably on the back of some Government mandated security nonsense. I wouldn’t put it past some networks deciding that the words ‘abortion’ and a few other incendiary phrases would be red flagged and moderated. Can you imagine getting a text message — or worse, an automatic paper letter, signed by some pen pusher, reading (“Dear Ewan, when you told your friend [Robert] to F*CK OFF in a text message sent on January 21st at 09:01 GMT, you contravened our terms and conditions and our politeness policy. We therefore ask you to strictly avoid the use of the terms listed below when sending text messages in the future. As per our censorship policies, you have been charged 25 pounds for this letter.”)

I can really see that sort of thing happening. Ridiculous. Here’s hoping the networks continue to focus on price plan cultivation and not arsing around with home routing and the inevitable text censorship that will occur.