The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims, but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about you.
The only (ONLY) motive is profit. Growth, growth, growth above all costs at the expense of people and the environment. Jeff jumped into this thread to try to color it with verbiage such as:
> we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.
This is another way to habituate and legitimate the exploitation of users for those few who profit. An example, is the A2P 10DLC registration that is being forced on users of the product that will charge a registration fee, a vetting fee, and a recurring monthly cost. From what I can tell, there is no legal basis forcing this. The Telco cartel got together and came up with a way to make more money off of you. Sure they will talk about it in terms of "improving your experience" and "stopping spam texts". While there may be a kernel of truth in there, that is not the main reason. Go back to rule number 1: profit, profit, profit.
It is a shame that the Telcos are strong arming the CSP middlemen to make them abide by these rules or not deliver their messages. And of course that rolls down to the end users.
But I think the bigger issue here is that they need to know exactly who you are in terms of registration. Blocking VOIP numbers for OTP verification, etc etc. Why do you think this is? Because they will take all of the data you provide, the metadata you produce and sell it to third parties for profit at your expense and without your consent (or otherwise wrapped up in a "privacy policy" that is too long that no one reads).
None of what I am saying is new, it is the same old playbook that most people are ignorant of. I suggest reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff for a deeper study of this topic.
If you would like to refute any of this @jeffiel I would welcome it. I find the forced registration of A2P 10DLC absolutely horrifying. The trend for everybody is to put them into a "pre-crime" bucket. In doing so, we lose all privacy on the web, and with it the web itself.
Edit: I don't know Jeff and I am not making my comment about a personal attack or a character (mis)representation. My point is to look at trends in general, at the decline of privacy for the growth of profit, and how language is used to characterize it as something else selling it as you are getting a better experience through personalization, relevancy, effective, etc. Zuboff touches on this in her book and it is recently in my mind so my comments are coming through the lens of this recent discovery. However, the larger anti-privacy trend and centralization across the web is not new, and I stand that we are all losers if we allow this trend to continue.