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Comment by opendomain | Hacker News Reader

I am a big fan of twillio, but I suspect that they or companies like it are contributing to the problem.

I would like everyone that uses a telephone API to be required to register a bond. If they are found abusing the system, they will lose the bond and be banned from using ANY companies telephone system.

That telephony companies do not take the opportunity fix tbe actual problem makes me think a court may be able to find they are complicit.

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Contrary to popular belief, Twilio is not exactly magic. They're great in that they put a simple, easy to understand API, and very low startup friction (painful signup almost more important than cost) to do things you knew were possible, but didn't want to deal with figuring out how to sign up for. They weren't necessarily the first one to do that either.

My point is, there are at least hundreds of providers you can get a voip line from, in addition to the many traditional carriers you could get conventional phone lines from; many of which are not really beholden to the courts of whichever jurisdiction you choose. Getting them all to agree not to provide service to one person is going to be hard; especially with the large networks of reselling resold traffic.

I would love to see some sort of regulation requiring some ability to trace down the origin of calls, though. There should be a way to track back which carriers (and their customers) involved when the recipient would like to press charges against the entity that placed the call (ex: the fraudulent callers from "The Windows" trying to "fix" my computer). There are valid reasons for anonymous calling, so safeguards should be in place, maybe just a star code (feature code) to indicate the last received call was spam, and a caller that generates a large number of reported calls is subject to investigation by the carrier and referral to law enforcement if appropriate.

We need for phones something like what we did for email when the spam first started getting out of control -- blacklists for providers that don't have and reasonably enforce AUPs.

It may be that the US courts have no jurisdiction over a VOIP provider in Kazakhstan, but there's no reason my phone provider can't simply refuse to route their calls.

One of the most important/valuable things about Twilio is that people can get started easily with little friction. If you add a bond (aka insurance) into the process, you've added a ton of friction that will only solve a problem relevant in a tiny percentage of situations.

It doesn't have to be that complicated. Consider, for example, the credit card pre-authorization hotels perform when you check into a hotel, to ensure you can pay for incidental expenses (room service, mini bar, etc).

One can easily imagine doing something similar at signup time for postpaid services like Twilio (or any other abusable SaaS, for that matter).

Yes, and also, as toast0 says, it's likely to be impossible to have all those providers agree on such a system.

But phone operators should do something, like block voicemails left by a robot, either by detecting them automatically, or blacklisting numbers, or, why not, offer the option of a captcha before leaving a message:

in order to leave a message to this person, please enter the result of the following operation: how much is 3 times 4...

Maybe there's an opportunity for a startup here. It could work before the fact with a captcha as above, or after the fact: it would listen to your messages and spam-rate them.

https://www.nomorobo.com/ does the rating based on phone number, effectively an RBL

What bond amount will both let a young entrepreneur play and learn and at the same time prevent a scammer with (relatively speaking) much deeper pockets?

Seems likely it could scale with expected usage.

Perhaps they could only be allowed to make calls to numbers that they have verified before investing in the bond.

  everyone that uses a telephone API

How does one enforce such a thing, around the world, where interoperable telephone systems interact across multiple jurisdictions, some of which might not be as advanced, in technical terms, as others? What constitutes abuse? Which countries will this apply to first? Who is capable of making such a thing possible?

>How does one enforce such a thing, around the world

Strongarming.

>Who is capable of making such a thing possible?

The US.

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