"But this could be easily regulated. I don't understand why anyone can spoof anything they want."
No, unfortunately it's not easy to regulate. It would involve not just all domestic operators, but also all telecom service aggregators (e.g. Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, and a thousand more), to find common ground and coordination of a working register of what company has the rights to what SMS sender name within one nation's network, whether it's numeric or alphanumeric.
STIR/SHAKEN (which regulates usage of numeric caller IDs for phone calls) has taken ages to come to fruition, and that's despite the huge technical benefit of phone numbers being inherently anonymous and already belonging to a specific network operator. With the sender of an SMS the logistics are very different, and that's before even touching on the enormous business of legitimate SMS services and how these should be able to compete on the open market.
No, unfortunately it's not easy to regulate. It would involve not just all domestic operators, but also all telecom service aggregators (e.g. Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, and a thousand more), to find common ground and coordination of a working register of what company has the rights to what SMS sender name within one nation's network, whether it's numeric or alphanumeric.
STIR/SHAKEN (which regulates usage of numeric caller IDs for phone calls) has taken ages to come to fruition, and that's despite the huge technical benefit of phone numbers being inherently anonymous and already belonging to a specific network operator. With the sender of an SMS the logistics are very different, and that's before even touching on the enormous business of legitimate SMS services and how these should be able to compete on the open market.