kgb 542542

» see kgbkgb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A short code is a national object. 542542 worked if your phone bill came from a United States carrier and did nothing at all if it did not, which is most of why this stayed a story about American phones. The Turkish premium SMS market of the same years sold ringtones and horoscope subscriptions, so there was never a domestic version of this to compare it against.

The company behind it was older and stranger than the product. INFONXX was founded in New York in 1992 by Robert Pines and made its money in directory assistance, the business of answering the phone when somebody wants a number. When the United Kingdom opened its directory enquiries market in 2003 the company launched 118 118 there, then 118 218 in France, and by the late 2000s it was calling itself the largest independent directory assistance operator in the world. It renamed itself kgb in 2008. The three letters stood for knowledge generation bureau, a line lifted out of an advertisement rather than an actual company name, and the joke about the other KGB was the whole of the branding.

542542 launched on 5 January 2009, a month after kgb bought the British firm Texperts and inherited its platform. You texted a question to the number, any question, and ninety-nine cents later a written answer came back. On the other end was a person working from home, logged into a queue, searching the web on your behalf against a clock. kgb called them Special Agents and hired them in the tens of thousands. The price later moved to $1.49.

The advertising ran far ahead of the business. kgb bought a thirty-second spot in the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV on 7 February 2010, a sumo wrestling bit, sitting between the beer and the car companies. ChaCha ran the same model at 242242 with the same kind of crowd workforce, and the two of them spent 2009 and 2010 buying attention for a category that had about two years left.

~ the dossier ~

~ the special agents ~

The labor arrangement was the actual product. An answer somebody writes costs whatever that somebody is paid, so the entire margin on a ninety-nine cent text lives in how cheaply the answering can be done. kgb classed its Special Agents as independent contractors and paid them by the answer, which meant no minimum wage floor and no overtime exposure on the largest cost line the company had.

Applying was closer to signing up for a game than getting hired. You took a test, you got a login, you worked whatever hours you wanted, and your pay tracked how fast and how accurately you cleared questions. College students did a lot of it. The reporting from the time reads like gig work because that is what it was, running a few years ahead of the vocabulary.

~ what the labor department found ~

The United States Department of Labor investigated, and the case ended on 12 February 2013 with a consent judgment: kgb USA owed 1.3 million dollars in back wages to more than 14,500 workers. The government's position was that the Special Agents had been employees the whole time, misclassified as contractors and paid under the federal minimum.

The class period in the complaint reads as a timeline of the product. It opens on 19 January 2009, two weeks after the short code went live, and closes on 4 December 2012. After that date there was no longer a workforce to misclassify.

~ what replaced it ~

Nothing did. The service launched into a market where a large share of American phones could send a text and could not usefully search anything, and that market closed on its own schedule. By 2012 the same person with the same question was holding a browser and a free voice assistant that would at least try.

kgbkgb.com served its own pages until 28 February 2012 and by 18 April was redirecting to kgbanswers.com, the free web version, which answered until December 2018 and was gone by the following spring. The domain today belongs to an Indonesian gambling blog. kgb.com is still up, still owned by Robert Pines, and now describes itself as a long-term investor looking for resilient management teams.

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