Well folks, its time to save the telecom world (again.)

With the distraction of one-to-one finally behind everybody we can now focus on the real battle– the blatant censorship and defamation being carried out everyday by the nation’s wireless carriers and their cohort of aggregator chums.

People are rightly waking up to the abuses of content-monitoring on social media networks but they remain largely blind to the far-more insidious censorship taking place on the most critical “social” network of all– the nation’s telephone system.

For years now the wireless carriers in this nation–banding together to form a cartel-like organization known as the CTIA–have dictated what Americans are allowed to say to each other over the phone and how they are allowed to communicate.

They have blocked billions of constitutionally-protected and perfectly legal calls/texts simply because they did not like the content of those calls– because they used certain “banned” words like “free” or “debt.”

They have served as judge, jury, and executioner of speech day in, day out.

And the worst part– the vast majority of Americans don’t even know its happening.

Oh sure they may have detected it here and there. Where was that reminder the company said it was going to send out? I know I needed to submit another loan document but I was supposed to receive a text? I thought I had a payment due, but the link for credit card never came through?

Most Americans assume these unfortunate everyday occurrences are just glitches. Network traffic jams or misdirected communications.

No. The truth is far worse.

Messages such as these are commonly blocked or delayed specifically based upon their content– a real-time censorship regime of the highest order operating right beneath our noses.

The carriers answer to no one. The FCC has never provided guidelines in terms of what can be blocked and what can’t be. All that carriers know now is they can use “reasonable analytics” to block “unwanted calls.”

But what does that even mean?

Its time for the FCC to answer that and give the carriers CLEAR rules of the road for the sorts of calls and texts they can block and what they CANNOT. Specifically, R.E.A.C.H. this morning has asked the FCC to clarify the following:

1. Clarify and confirm no member of the U.S. telecommunication ecosystem (including the wireless carriers and parties with whom they are in contractual privity) may block, throttle, or limit calls or text, MMS, RCS, SMS or other communications to telephone numbers on the basis of content;
2. Clarify and confirm no member of the U.S. telecom ecosystem (including the wireless carriers and parties with whom they are in contractual privity) may block, throttle, or limit calls or text, MMS, RCS, SMS or other communications to telephone numbers that were sent consistent with the TCPA’s statutory text and applicable regulation; and
3. Clarify and confirm any blocking, throttling, or limiting of calls or texts on the basis of content or any blocking, throttling, or limiting of calls or texts that were initiated consistent with the TCPA’s text and any applicable Commission’s rules is presumptively “unreasonable” under the Communications Act.

But call blocking is only half of the problem.

The wireless networks are also talking trash about callers behind their backs.

They label callers “scam” or “spam” or even “likely fraud” many time with ZERO actual indication the call is improper or illegal. I have heard stories of people missing calls from schools, friends, lawyers– even the police!–due to the INSANE mislabeling of callers taking place right now.

And the worst part?

The carriers are likely intentionally over-labeling to drive companies to use their “solutions”– white-label branded caller ID products that make the carriers millions in ill-gotten revenue.

Its terrible.

Many businesses won’t play the carriers little protection-money game so they turn to buying massive quantities of phone numbers to cycle through when one gets mislabeled. The carriers don’t like that and try to stop the practice to make sure they can maximize profits– but its only a natural response to the insane mislabeling practices exercised by the carriers themselves.

We need to put a stop to ALL of this.

As such R.E.A.C.H. is also asking the FCC today to prevent any labeling of legal calls. PERIOD.

Last– the biggest problem of all.

TCR– the Campaign Registry.

Every single business and political campaign in the nation that wishes to use a regular phone number to send high-volume text messages has to jump through the shifting and uncertain hoops presented by something called the TCR. Registration requires various disclosures of the types of messages to be sent, content, lists, practices, plans, etc.

A complete blueprint of every SMS program in America.

And guess what?

TCR’s parent is foreign owned.

*head exploding emoji*

Why in the world America would deliver a ready-made model of every SMS strategy deployed by every American business into the hands of a foreign company whose practices cannot be tracked and data footprint cannot be traced is a question beyond answer. It is entirely insane–especially when we consider political content is also disclosed.

WHAT ARE WE THINKING?

If TikTok is a threat to America, TCR is triple the threat.

R.E.A.C.H. asks the FCC to look into TCR and evaluate shutting down the entire campaign registration process or, alternatively, requiring the registry to be sold to an American-owned business.

Rather obviously these three asks– stopping call/text blocking, mislabeling, and a registration process that is a threat to national security– are the most important changes needed to preserve and protect our nation’s critical telecommunications infrastructure.

R.E.A.C.H., as an organization, is proud to be the vehicle behind this absolutely necessary movement. But we need your help!

When the FCC issues a notice of public comment we can expect the wireless carriers to fight tooth and nail in a short-sighted effect to preserve the current mess–truthfully, while carriers profit now they stand to lose everything in the long term by these errant practices as businesses move away from the PTSN altogether and toward OTT services– but we need YOUR help to assure the right movement is taken by the Commission on these items.

We will provide much more information over time. But for now begin cataloging all the ways the current SMS/call-blocking/labeling/registration paradigm is crippling consumers and your businesses.

Let’s put an end to censorship. An end to wide-scale defamation. An end to foreign companies snooping through our SMS practices.

Let’s get smart America.

And let’s save our damn telephone network.

Read the full petition here: REACH Petition to Save the World