Before Hurricane Harvey, wireless carriers lobbied against upgrades to a national emergency alert system

For years, the Federal Communications Commission has endeavored to upgrade the sort of short text-based messages — often accompanied by a loud alarm — that authorities have used since 2012 to warn Americans about rising floods, abducted children and violent criminals at large. But efforts to bring those alerts into the digital age — requiring, for example, that they include multimedia and foreign-language support — have been met with skepticism or opposition from the likes of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile, and even some device makers, too. Carriers have argued that some of those changes could prove technically difficult or costly to implement, while congesting their networks — and in recent months, they’ve encouraged the FCC to slow down its work. Tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, meanwhile, also have lobbied the agency against some proposed rules that might put more burden on them for delivering emergency alerts to smartphones. It all amounts to a great deal of well-lawyered bickering in Washington (DC) and it stands in stark contrast to the dire Category 4 megastorm that’s poised to cause immense rainfall, flooding and damage in Texas.