Where does the open public-warning stack stop being open?
International Deaf Emergency (IDE), October 2026.
An exploratory report for the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, a fiscally sponsored project of Aspiration. Supported by a grant from Aspiration.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Drafted with AI assistance under the author's direction; every claim was checked against its cited source where that source could be opened. The few sources that could not be opened are named as such in the references.
Summary
It is three in the morning. A Deaf woman's phone lies face down on the nightstand, and the buzz she feels is the same buzz her phone gives for a flash flood, a missing child or a tornado: federal rules set one vibration pattern for every Wireless Emergency Alert, whatever the danger and however serious it is. To learn what is happening, she has to wake fully, find the phone, turn it over and read a short block of English text. Nothing in this scene is broken. Every part worked as designed. So our question is about that last step: where does the open public-warning stack stop being open, who maintains the layer beyond that point, and under what mandate? Emergency alerts in the United States travel through infrastructure that is about as open as public infrastructure gets. The message format, the Common Alerting Protocol, is a free international standard that anyone can read. The gateway that collects alerts from local, state, tribal and federal authorities is run by a public agency, FEMA. The rules for alerts on phones are federal regulations, published online, that anyone can read and comment on. The moment is specific. In January 2025 the Federal Communications Commission ordered carriers to support pre-written alerts in American Sign Language from June 2028, and in June 2026 the Commission opened a new round of rulemaking that asks about hazard symbols and braille displays. Who keeps the last layer is being settled now, one rule at a time.
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