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The talk on Wall Street is The Campaign Registry is for sale, again. The bankers, Lazard, have created a data room to explore TCR’s results, and private equity groups (who are ripping off America) are searching for as much info as they can gather.

This exposure of information prompted Johnny to use a picture on Linkedin of someone with their pants pulled down.

Given Von Coalition‘s request to the Federal Communications Commission to remove the The Campaign Registry given its conflict of interest in being owned by Tata Communications / Kaleyra. https://alanquayle.com/2024/05/von-coalition-proposal-to-fcc/. This could be one of the drivers for Tata Communications to sell.

However, Johnny indicated some of the VON Coalition members have cut side-deals with TCR. This will naturally favor the larger UCaaS / CCaaS / CPaaS providers. And provides further evidence on the difficulty for smaller companies to compete in the US market. And those side deals likely mean the pressure to divest TCR has lessened. Foreign ownership has become a mute issue.

The allegations of election interference made in Bill Peters’ complaint https://alanquayle.com/2023/09/william-peters-plaintiff-versus-kaleyra-defendant/, are waiting on Bill’s arbitration to end in 2025 as far as I know. Judge Colleen McMahon described arbitration as, “Long, drawn-out, lawless litigation.”
https://alanquayle.com/2024/07/judge-colleen-mcmahon/.

The federal case for Bill’s complain is unlikely to start until the middle of 2025. Fired in 2022, and still waiting for resolution in possibly 2025 on the arbitration. And possibly 2026/2027 on the federal case, so unlikely to be a driver for the sale.

SMS spam continues to rise in the US (article has 2024 numbers), https://www.slicktext.com/blog/2022/10/17-spam-text-statisitics-for-2022/. Clearly TCR is not having the claimed impact.

Why would Twilio touch this? The programmable comms market is moving to enterprise services / workflows, see RingCentral, Zoom, and all the CX/Contact Center providers. Away from SMS APIs, to omnichannel, that is SMS, RCS, and IP messaging. TCR is one piece of a increasingly complex picture.

Google has its own methods for RCS brand and RBM (Rich Business Messaging) approvals. TCR with its likely heavier regulations should they buy it and US-only focus seems a bit of a stretch.

In a recent discussion it was pointed out we’re witnessing the tragedy of the commons in SMS. Aggregators are focused on making money through passing SMS spam onto customers, enabling fraud of businesses, etc. See Truth in S2P SMS series for a review across the 30 year history of SMS. It doesn’t need to be this way. However, the end customers (businesses and consumers) have no say. Change is only going to happen if carriers take back control of SMS.

As Robert Vis of Bird said “CPaaS is done!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BIxOEwAto. The world is moving on, just some companies / organizations are tied to declining business models. Juniper Research forecast SMS revenue will shrink 28 per cent from $66 billion in 2024 to $47 billion in 2029. This is of note because an analyst firm is saying something other than everything in awesome, which is rare.

So the result is Tata Communications either is worried it may lose TCR after the election, or wants its money back as its realized the challenges with Kaleyra, and TCR sale is the easiest and quickest way to achieve that. Likely its the later driver.

Johnny asks for anyone in the know on the frame job of Bill Peters to come forward. Once the complain goes to court, the frame job is a crime, potentially someone could end up in jail.