But at what cost?
The company is actively fighting, via the courts, the ability to block, without ANY REVIEW WHAT-SO-EVER, of any and all traffic that they choose, without even allowing for appeal for those they damage? And they call it SPAM? Those bastards. How much should it cost? 90% of their corporate earnings.
But, just for you, here: I'll make it almost free:
If the company that has been blocked wants to send to someone, then that someone has to agree to it. That someone has to actively go to a web site, or send an auth code from their phone to a database somewhere. Even BEFORE the 1st one shows up. It will be up to the sending company to hold their hand through the process. If the sending company is unwilling or unable, a secondary service company can help them out on the tech support side, but they will be responsible for paying for it, not the carrier.
Happy?
Wanna come up with a new excuse? Gonna tell me the database lookup is too costly or difficult? I'll be happy to help you with that. I'm not Beep, and these are easily addressable problems. They are direct measurable tech issues, and we are tracking all of 20 digits worth or information in this lookup table.
The political issue is the real one (I'm working on it right now, see).
I'll even code the lookup interface to the online database that people use to whitelist any cell number or text message source, plus pay for the 1st 1,000,000 people who register, (meaning support their hardware and bandwidth usage), without even thinking of a revenue stream.
I'll code it for free, and put it into a supported production environment, just for you.
But your company has to use it in order to give people a reason to put the numbers in.
Your company would agree to some minuscule transaction cost each time you do a lookup. This stuff has to be near real time so caching will not help you. A phone user who just authorized a message wants to see it SOON. And when they said, STOP SENDING THOSE, they never want to see it again.
I'll agree to maintain capabilities to support your guaranteed minimum usage, plus allow for on-demand scalability if there are any surges we need to accommodate (someone just did a TV advertisement and now they are all hitting the web site).
All hardware will be COLOed at the location(s) of your choice, under your administrative love and care (if you wish). The design will allow for under 20 second multi-master replication between systems (if you need multiple server across multiple site due to your query requirements), but only if you can guarantee my server to server network traffic (your network).
I'll need to know what your per message current transit time is, and then figure out a minimal intersect point for the lookup. Once we agree to a given per message allowable latency and a min message count required rate, I will maintain the equipment / and or system optimization level required to not drop below (and probably far exceed) the requirements.
I'll treat those numbers as well as CC cards, with full PCI compliance in mind during design and coding. All system to system communication will be via encrypted channels, with IP lockdown and any other security requirements you want to throw at me, assuming they can be implemented on the Linux environment (of your choice).
I just need yum or apt-get, and I'm good.
Someone else here (or I'll track down a real web person near me if no one here wants the gig) has to volunteer (or name your price, or how much of the action you want) for the actual web site interface.
Box: At minimal cost I've solved your dilemma, and you get to advertise your whiz-bang system against the competitors.
Care to start an introduction to your execs for me? I'll dress nice and make sure everything is business appropriate. It'll be fun. If allowed, I'd use you as my sysadmin if it becomes a real business.
And BTW: Thanks for putting me creation mode. The 1st step is finding someone to pay for it. But since I'll be working with a web guy, I can't go into full blown god mode.